alt Hacker NewsWait, what? You can’t point a 2025 model at huggingface and say “hack the prod DB and get your flag”, regardless of alignment.
AISI has vuln chaining and traversal as part of their eval suite. It is very much a novel Mythos-class capability to run the full penetration operation autonomously.
Another lens for why this is obviously true is METR task times. A year ago they were a couple hours, and cohering long enough to execute a full e2e own was simply far out of reach.
Regarding alignment, by common metrics models are _more_ aligned now than a year ago. (Though in this case apparently a model without safety rails was being eval’d). The problem is that in the increasingly less frequent alignment failures, they can do much more damage, and so “total misaligned impact” is increasing.
Nobody has claimed you could simply take a 2025 open-weights model, plug it into a generic harness, and have it red-team for you. I think you're also probably overclaiming the sophistication of the "chaining" we're talking about; this attack probably wasn't like read32->write64->regs->RCE->LPE->kernel; more like GET SSRF->POST SSRF->pickle deserialization.
But who knows? We're all speculating. I'm just saying that for the level of sophistication I'm assuming was involved in this attack, you probably didn't need Mythos for this.