Last month, a group of computer researchers ran a test.

They wanted to try using artificial intelligence to hack an operating system called OpenBSD.

So OpenBSD is an operating system, you know, like Windows or MacOS. It's been around for a long time.

Our colleague Bob McMillan covers cybersecurity. He says this operating system is considered very

secure. It's survived decades of cyber attacks. It's kind of on the front of the internet for

many corporations. It's used in firewalls.

So it's facing the hackers all the time.

So it's a good project to look at because it's been battle tested, right?

And it's had lots of time for people to look for bugs and report them and fix them and stuff like that.

A software bug is a flaw in a computer program that causes problems, or even a crash.

Hackers try to find bugs because they can use them as sort of a door into an otherwise closed computer system.

So in this experiment, researchers took the latest AI model from Anthropic, called Mythos,

then let it loose into the software.

And they said, find us some bugs.

And it found this bug.

A guy named Niels Provost had written some code in 1998, and he made a mistake.

And nobody noticed that mistake for over 27 years until mythos took a shot at it.

Wow.

The bug mythos found could have caused a serious problem, and it had sat there undetected by humans for nearly 30 years.

So, I mean, what does this tell you about mythos? Is it better at this than humans?

I mean, it's, you could sort of craft this narrative, like, oh, my gosh, they've had 27 years and

like no one saw it, and then AI found it.

...