DeFi Users Urged to Revoke Approvals Before Mythos AI Launch

Anthropic is reportedly preparing to release a public version of its Mythos AI model. This has sparked warnings from crypto analyst The DeFi Investor, who is urging decentralized finance users to act before the launch.

The concern stems from Mythos’s proven ability to find software vulnerabilities. If a widely accessible version hits the market, attackers could accelerate the discovery and exploitation of weaknesses in DeFi protocols.

What the DeFi Community Needs to Do

In a June 9 post on X, The DeFi Investor advised followers to revoke all token approvals, use only heavily audited dApps, and spread funds across multiple wallets to limit single points of failure.

Token approvals, for those unfamiliar, are permissions users grant to smart contracts so they can spend tokens on their behalf. These permissions tend to accumulate silently over time. They create a standing attack surface if any approved contract later proves vulnerable.

“What’s scary about Mythos is that it’s insanely good at finding severe vulnerabilities,” wrote The DeFi Investor. “Claude Opus 4.8 has also recently identified a critical bug for Zcash, and Mythos is supposed to be even better than Opus 4.8.”

They added that DeFi will face a huge stress test in the next few months. The Zcash vulnerability gave a concrete illustration of this risk.

The privacy coin lost more than 35% of its value in one day after a security researcher using AI discovered a bug in its shielded Orchard pool. That bug would have allowed bad actors to endlessly mint new $ZEC tokens. The incident also saw big-time crypto investor Arthur Hayes exit his entire $ZEC position, as uncertainty mounted over whether anyone might have already exploited the flaw.

Mythos has been restricted since April to about 50 organizations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, through an Anthropic initiative known as Project Glasswing. The goal was to put the model’s capabilities to work for defensive purposes. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic plans to expand that circle by 150 more organizations across 15 countries.

However, multiple sources, including TFTC and journalist Alex Heath, have claimed the public version of Mythos will carry substantial guardrails. It won’t be as permissive as what Project Glasswing partners can access.

A Debate DeFi Was Already Having

The DeFi Investor’s security tips come at a time when a larger conversation is building around the viability of decentralized finance.

In late May, OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz declared all of DeFi unsafe and said he had advised people to exit positions in major protocols, including Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound. His reasoning was that AI has tilted the security balance so far toward attackers that no protocol can be trusted to safely hold users’ funds.

Many crypto projects have been hit in the last few months. Attacks on KelpDAO and Drift Protocol in April led to losses of more than $570 million combined. More recently, hackers reportedly siphoned at least $30 million worth of Humanity Protocol’s H token from 17 wallets.

But according to Aave Chan Initiative founder Mark Zeller, fears about AI may be overblown. He noted that fewer than 10% of DeFi security failures in the past year were caused by code-level vulnerabilities.

Anthropic’s own position, per Bloomberg, is that in the long run, AI will favor defenders. But the company acknowledged that the transitional period will be fraught.

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