Indian Firms Gain Early Access to Anthropic's Claude Mythos AI for Cybersecurity
Several Indian organisations, both public and private, in the cyber, telecom, finance and banking industries have secured early access to US artificial intelligence firm Anthropic's highly guarded Claude Mythos model, top government officials said.
Their number currently remains in the single digits, they told ET on Wednesday, a day after Anthropic announced the expanded Project Glasswing cybersecurity initiative giving access to 150 more organisations to its most advanced frontier model. The list does not have any major Indian information technology firms, they said.
"The government is actively engaging with Anthropic to widen the access further," a senior official told ET.
The Indian government through select public entities will get a preview of Mythos, the official said. These entities may also include India's nodal cybersecurity agency CERT-In, for which the government had specifically sought access.
Officials did not reveal the names of the Indian entities on the new list. "Anthropic has requested the 150 additional entities to not discuss the details for a couple of days. The company will officially announce the names in the coming days," one of them said.
ET reported earlier that the government, led by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), was engaged in talks with the US administration for the last two months to ensure that India got access to Mythos and the country’s critical infrastructure is not compromised.
Anthropic had in April given access to the Mythos model to 50 organisations, including cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure; hardware majors like Nvidia and Apple; and banks including JPMorgan Chase. They have so far used it to find more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity security flaws that were previously unknown.
On Tuesday, Anthropic said it is extending the Glasswing partnership to 150 new organisations based in more than 15 countries, following several weeks of close collaboration with existing partners, the security industry, open-source software maintainers and the US government. Anthropic has said each of these new organisations must meet its security requirements before they gain access.
The group covers several industries that weren’t well represented in the initial cohort, such as power, water, healthcare, communications and hardware. Some of the new companies are vendors—companies or non-profits that maintain codebases that are relied upon by lots of other organisations, including governments.
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, electronics and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw as well as officials from their ministries and regulators including the Reserve Bank of India have met industry stakeholders multiple times over the past month to assess Mythos' potential impact on Indian systems and databases.
While many Indian companies had been interested in getting access to Mythos, officials had earlier said that the government would not be involved on their behalf. The Centre is engaged directly with Anthropic and has outlined its concerns, MeitY secretary S Krishnan had said earlier.
Indian IT service firms have been keen to get access to the Claude Mythos model, and industry body Nasscom had held discussions with Anthropic to be included in the project. Since enterprises across the globe use code written by IT firms, access to Mythos, which is reportedly the most powerful AI model to date, will help build cyber resilience, according to the IT industry.
Questions sent to Anthropic, Nasscom and top IT service firms Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCLTech, Wipro and Tech Mahindra remained unanswered at press time Wednesday.
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