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Introducing the Anthropic Cyber Mission
Summary
Anthropic grouped its cyber-defence work under a "Cyber Mission" and launched two new programmes: a Critical Infrastructure Defense Program for operators of physical systems, and OSS Scanner, a free vulnerability-scanning service for open-source projects. It also announced funding for open-source security foundations.
Key points
- Critical Infrastructure Defense Program (CIDP): frontier Claude models, on-site engineers, and threat research for operational technology in power, water, transport, and government systems. Eleven founding partners: Accenture, Booz Allen, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, Dragos, Hitachi, Insane Cyber, Nozomi Networks, Palo Alto Networks, PwC, and Rockwell Automation.
- OSS Scanner: opt-in, free scanning of open-source projects with frontier models. Reports come with proof-of-concept exploits and suggested fixes; Anthropic expects a true-positive rate above 90%.
- Funding: support for the Python Software Foundation, Alpha-Omega, OpenSSF, and the Apache Software Foundation, plus Akrites and Gold Eagle for vulnerability coordination. A Defender Advantage Fund (0xDAF) pays for OSS Scanner.
- Builds on a June 2026 programme for US state and local governments, which Anthropic says now supports over half of US states.
Why it matters
It extends the pattern seen in the Cyber Verification Program (2026-10-06): frontier labs hold back offensive cyber capability by default and push it towards defenders. Open-source maintainers can now get model-found vulnerability reports without paying, which may raise the volume of security fixes, and of reports to triage.