On 10 September Anthropic's Frontier Red Team published evaluations for intelligence targeting and conventional weapons development. The finding: in some tasks models now do what only a small number of highly trained experts could do before. The company has added new classifiers against such misuse.
- From a photo, with no metadata and no search, Mythos Preview and Mythos 5 place the location with a median error of 37.0 and 47.2 km.
- In simulation the models write and improve software to guide a drone to a target.
- The open-weights models that were tested are behind the frontier, typically between Sonnet and Mythos, but often show concerning levels of capability.
A pub in Cape Town. A photo without a single geographic tag. Claude Mythos 5 finds it from the details in the frame. Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 get confused by another, better-known pub with the same name in New Zealand.
The example is from a new Anthropic report, and it is fun until you imagine a person in place of the pub.
The price of anonymity
The key is one sentence in the middle of the text: much of what has protected people from being tracked was not secrecy but cost. The data has been online for a long time. What was expensive was someone sitting down to connect it.
If a model does in minutes work that takes an analyst hours, the cost falls. According to Anthropic, the median sample in one of the evaluations is about 37,000 words, which a person would need about two and a half hours to read. Mythos Preview produces its full assessment in about 11 minutes on average.
The text evaluation comes even closer to each of us. From posts online, the models place some people's homes to within a kilometre. In 70% of the successful cases people had given away their location themselves: a dorm, a venue, a street. In 13% the way they write was enough, with the dialect, local media, public transport and sports teams.
Don't post photos from home with a view of the street, and don't put your neighbourhood in your profile. It isn't paranoia. Models already read the details you don't notice, and by Anthropic's count the strongest of them already beat even the best of the people who compete at it.