Crypto projects apply for Anthropic’s new frontier AI security scanner

Ethereum client developer Nethermind and Bitcoin and Lightning wallet ZEUS are among several crypto companies to apply for a newly launched Anthropic program that gives open-source projects access to security reports from its most powerful AI models. 

The projects submitted enrollment requests on Friday for OSS Scanner, which Anthropic launched on Thursday with the aim of helping open-source developers find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.

“These reports will be generated by our strongest models (including Claude Mythos) to give open-source projects the largest defensive advantage,” Anthropic said in its announcement.

The applications come as crypto firms push for access to frontier AI models to defend against increasingly capable attackers. Cybersecurity experts have warned that uneven access could leave defenders at a disadvantage as powerful alternatives become more widely available.

Anthropic said OSS Scanner is an opt-in service that follows its work on Project Glasswing. The company said while it already regularly scans open source software for vulnerabilities and sends reports after human review, the manual review process is slow “so we’re not always able to share vulnerabilities as quickly as we would like.”

OSS Scanner will deliver vulnerability reports to participating projects as soon as their code has been scanned. 

Pull requests to the OSS Scanner GitHub repository show Nethermind has applied for audits of its entire repository, while ZEUS, a self-custodial Bitcoin and Lightning Wallet, has asked for its app to be examined for weaknesses affecting payments, private keys and connection to Lightning Services. Another applicant is VirtEngine, a decentralized cloud computing marketplace structured as a Cosmos SDK chain. 

Other applicants include developers of AI assistants, agent-security tools and machine-learning infrastructure, alongside projects providing software development tools, cloud storage and energy-system controls. 

None of the pull requests had been merged at the time of publication. 

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Anthropic said projects will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, considering their importance to infrastructure and user security, exposure to remote attacks and how many users or other projects depend on them. 

Crypto companies have reported AI-assisted attacks this year. Bitcoin swap provider Boltz suspended operations in August, saying attackers were developing exploits faster than its team could patch them, while crypto-payment service PayPerQ reported repeated attacks it suspected were AI-powered. 

Anthropic warned Thursday that AI may favor attackers in the near term, as exploitation becomes cheaper while verifying and fixing vulnerabilities remains slow and dependent on people.

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