This is not a security problem — Anthropic’s Mythos, GlassWing and how the industry must move forward

When Anthropic broke the news of Mythos and Project Glasswing, the security community did what it always does. It published a flurry of papers asking, “What does this mean for security?” It’s a reasonable instinct, but it’s the wrong question.

The real question is who actually owns the problem?

The advice is right. The audience is wrong

Even Anthropic’s own guidance on preparing your security team for the AI era, comprehensive and well-reasoned as it is, lands squarely on steps that security teams can influence but cannot execute. Maintaining accurate inventories of exposed systems, decommissioning legacy services and minimizing API exposure. These are all the right steps. They are also unambiguously engineering steps.

Security teams have owned these conversations for years, not because they were ever truly equipped to act on them, but because engineering was remarkably effective at passing the responsibility to someone else. That era is over.

The Eng & Sec silos have to go

Take attack surface reduction as a concrete example. Anthropic’s recommendations are sound: know what you’re exposing, shut down what you don’t need, lock down your APIs. But a security team cannot decommission a legacy service. They cannot refactor an API. They can nag, escalate and document, then watch the ticket sit in a backlog for six months.

Engineering has to take this on. Not reluctantly, not after repeated escalations, but as a core ownership responsibility. The framing of “security’s job” versus “engineering’s job” is a liability the industry can no longer afford.

The path forward is uncomfortable — but it starts now

This transition won’t be easy. Changing ownership models inside organizations is political, slow and often painful. But the alternative means maintaining siloed teams while AI-accelerated vulnerability exploitation scales faster than any manual process can respond. That isn’t a strategy. It’s a countdown.

Here’s what needs to happen immediately:

• Security and engineering must jointly review what we know about threats like Mythos and the recommendations Anthropic has put forward — together, in the same room, with shared accountability.
• Joint planning sessions aren’t optional. Shared war-gaming, shared roadmaps, shared ownership of remediation timelines.
• Cross-industry knowledge sharing is no longer optional. Threat actors collaborate, share tooling and iterate in the open. The industry has to build the same sharing culture attackers already have.

The wave is already here

This isn’t a theoretical future risk. The wave is already forming offshore, and most organizations are still debating whether to build a seawall.

AI hasn’t just made attackers faster; it has fundamentally changed the economics of exploitation. What once required a skilled threat actor, weeks of reconnaissance and significant resources can now be automated, scaled and deployed by someone with a capable model and a motivated prompt. Zero-day vulnerabilities that previously had a window of days or weeks before widespread exploitation are now being weaponized in hours. The asymmetry between attack and defense has never been more extreme.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the traditional security model was never built for this speed. It was built for a world where humans attacked and humans defended, where there was time to deliberate, escalate and patch. That world is gone.

Mythos doesn’t wait for your quarterly security review. GlassWing doesn’t care that your legacy service decommission is “on the roadmap for H2.” AI-powered exploit tooling operates at machine speed. And right now, the defense side of that equation is still running on organizational clock time.

Two futures

Organizations that recognize this moment and act on it will look very different in three years. Security and engineering will share OKRs, not just Slack channels. Remediation won’t be a ticket handed off between teams; it will be a joint sprint. Attack surface reduction will be an engineering hygiene standard, not a security audit finding.

Organizations that don’t adapt will face a different outcome. It won’t be a gradual decline, but a sudden, forced reorganization triggered by a breach that exposes exactly how brittle the old model was. The silo walls won’t come down in a planned migration. They’ll come down in an incident post-mortem.

This is the moment

Industry inflection points rarely announce themselves clearly, but this one is. The research is public and the threat models are documented. Anthropic, and others, have laid out precisely what needs to happen. The gap between knowing and doing is entirely organizational — and that gap is where the real risk lives.

The teams that start the hard conversations now about ownership, accountability and shared responsibility are the ones that will be positioned to respond when the wave hits. And it will hit. The question isn’t whether your organization needs to change. The question is whether you’ll choose the terms.

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