Anthropic launches Cyber Mission to defend power grids and open-source code

Anthropic has launched the Anthropic Cyber Mission, a new initiative aimed at protecting critical infrastructure and open-source software. The tools for the job are frontier AI models, engineering resources, threat research and money. The launch date was October 8, 2026. The timing reflects a shift in the threat landscape: AI is increasingly being used to attack systems, so defenders want the same firepower on their side. Two fronts: the grid and the code The mission concentrates on two areas. The first is operational technology, or OT, which covers power grids, water systems and transportation networks. That is also what makes OT hard to secure. Many of these systems cannot be taken offline for patching, which means the process of verifying and fixing a vulnerability is far more burdensome than updating a laptop. The second front is open-source software, or OSS. This is the freely shared code that underpins a huge share of the world’s applications, often maintained by small teams of volunteers. Here, the headline tool is the OSS Scanner. It offers automated vulnerability assessments to maintainers of eligible open-source projects, with a projected true-positive rate exceeding 90%....