Anthropic announced the Anthropic Cyber Mission on October 8, 2026, describing it as a long-term effort to help secure the systems the public relies on. The effort begins with two programs: a Critical Infrastructure Defense Program backed by 11 founding partners, and OSS Scanner, a free opt-in service that runs regular security scans of open-source software with the company’s strongest models.
Anthropic said frontier models can be misused to exploit vulnerabilities and conduct cyber operations, and that state-sponsored adversaries have spent years establishing footholds across many sectors so they can disrupt those systems. Defenders of critical infrastructure and the open-source community, the company said, have decades of security experience but face severe resource shortages, and the Cyber Mission will deploy engineering talent, tools, and funding to support them.
Critical Infrastructure Defense Program
The Critical Infrastructure Defense Program delivers frontier Claude models, on-site engineers, and Anthropic’s threat research to the trusted providers that defend operational technology, starting with the systems behind power grids, water systems, and transportation networks, alongside government systems. Its founding partners are Accenture, Booz Allen, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, Dragos, Hitachi, Insane Cyber, Nozomi Networks, Palo Alto Networks, PwC, and Rockwell Automation.
Anthropic described the group as spanning the consulting and advanced-technology companies that run security programs, the security companies that guard business and industrial networks, and the manufacturers that build and patch the equipment itself. Several partners are already working with Claude to fix vulnerabilities and help customers do the same, the company said, and its first step is to work with a small cohort of providers to learn which strategies are most effective and practical. Companies that build security products or services for critical infrastructure can register interest as the program expands.
In statements published with the announcement, CrowdStrike said that “critical infrastructure facing machine-speed threats requires machine-speed defense,” and Palo Alto Networks said it is pairing its Unit 42 threat intelligence and operational expertise with Anthropic’s frontier models to help operators defend essential services. Booz Allen called operational technology the next frontier for autonomous AI-enabled attacks.
Operational Technology and Government Systems
Power grids, water utilities, factories, and transportation networks run on controllers, control software, and industrial networks built to last for decades, and they often cannot be taken offline to patch, so known vulnerabilities can remain unpatched for years. Anthropic called this specialized work, noting that the equipment is proprietary, that changes carry risk, and that a single mistake can take down a plant, leaving operators reliant on a small set of trusted providers. The company said it believes frontier models can help find and repair weaknesses before they are used to cut off power or make water unsafe, while acknowledging that critical infrastructure is hard to defend in many ways AI cannot fix.
The program extends Anthropic’s government-sector work. In June, the company launched a cyber defense program for state, local, tribal, and territorial governments; Anthropic said it has since offered frontier Claude models and technical support to more than half of all US states and some of the country’s largest public critical infrastructure operators, accelerating code scanning and patching, incident response, red teaming, and other security workflows.
OSS Scanner for Open-Source Projects
The second program, OSS Scanner, is an opt-in service inspired by Google’s OSS-Fuzz that gives enrolled open-source projects periodic scans from Anthropic’s most capable models, including Claude Mythos, at no cost. According to a Frontier Red Team post published the same day, each report contains a self-contained reproducer or proof of concept, an explanation with a bisection where possible, and a candidate patch when one is available. The reports are fully model-generated and sent without human review, which Anthropic said enables faster delivery but means some will contain inaccuracies such as a wrong severity rating; the company expects a true-positive rate above 90%.
To validate an early version, Anthropic asked the expert penetration testers who review its coordinated vulnerability disclosure findings to check 97 critical and high-severity scanner findings across 48 projects. The team reported that 85 (88%) met the bar for its disclosure process, that 11 of the remainder were real but duplicated known issues or other findings, and that one was a false positive. Over the last six months, the company said, its models flagged more than 29,000 candidate vulnerabilities, approximately 6,000 of which were manually reviewed and triaged, while nearly 5,000 unverified reports went directly to maintainers who asked to receive everything.
Maintainers quoted in the post reported strong results. Todd Ouska of wolfSSL said that “of the 74 reports we received, all but two were valid, and five became CVEs.” PostgreSQL’s Noah Misch said an unusually high fraction of the scanner’s findings uncovered PostgreSQL defects and that several reports came with fixes his team could use nearly as-is, while OpenSSL Corporation’s Anton Arapov said the reports his organization received, including raw model output, were as good as or better than what it gets from people. HotCRP’s Eddie Kohler described the bug reports as thorough and clear.
Core maintainers of eligible projects enroll by submitting a pull request to Anthropic’s oss-scanner GitHub repository, with eligibility based on criteria similar to those of OSS-Fuzz, including a critical impact on infrastructure and user security, decided case by case. Anthropic said projects without the capacity to triage findings will continue to receive human-verified disclosures under its coordinated vulnerability disclosure policy, and it distinguished OSS Scanner from Claude Security, its general-access enterprise code scanning and patching product. Maintainers can also apply to Claude for Open Source for free Claude Max subscriptions and to the Cyber Verification Program for expanded access.
Project Glasswing and Next Steps
Anthropic said the new efforts build on lessons from Project Glasswing, announced April 7, 2026 with Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks. Under that initiative, Anthropic committed up to $100 million in Claude Mythos Preview usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations, and it said it had donated $2.5 million to Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF through the Linux Foundation and $1.5 million to the Apache Software Foundation. On October 6, 2026, Anthropic launched an expanded Cyber Verification Program with three access tiers, and the Cyber Mission announcement said Project Glasswing has been merged into that program, with existing Glasswing members transitioning to the Specialized Access tier.
Anthropic said it has also funded the Python Software Foundation and supports Akrites and Gold Eagle, which gather and coordinate vulnerability reports from many sources so maintainers are not overwhelmed. The Defender Advantage Fund, launched in August, supports pilot programs in these areas and keeps OSS Scanner free.
Anthropic’s forecast is that within two years AI will favor defense, making it easier to catch bugs before they ship and to defend systems actively with models, though the company said that may not hold in the near term. It said that in Glasswing it often saw months pass between a vulnerability being found and fixed, and that with operational technology a fix can in rare cases take decades to apply safely. Over the coming months, Anthropic said, it will bring the Critical Infrastructure Defense Program to more partners and sectors, share what it learns including what did not work, expand its open-source and supply-chain work, and collaborate with other AI developers, security companies, and governments running efforts of their own.