I was trying to explain to a friend today how Claude Fable and Claude Mythos works and why they are so interesting
Here's what I came up with: Imagine you come over to my house and accidentally leave your car unlocked in the driveway
No big deal, right? Nobody drains your bank account because you forgot to lock your car
But a patient thief sees this as a starting line. He sneaks into your car while we're here having coffee and he doesn't take anything obvious. Instead he finds your gym fob in the cupholder and quietly clones it
That fob opens your locker at the gym the next time you go, and inside he can get your house key
The house key gets him through your front door and on the counter is your work badge
The badge gets him into your office after hours
In your desk drawer is your cafeteria card. The cafeteria card is tied to the building payment system. I don't know why but just follow me. The payment system is linked to payroll. And payroll is linked to the company bank account.
You get the idea: Your unlocked car door became a path to the company bank account through a chain of small little exploits
Every single step was somewhat worthless on its own. The gym fob couldn't touch the bank. The cafeteria card couldn't touch payroll, until it could. The trick was never any one hack. It was seeing how they all connected
That is what Mythos is shockingly good at
It finds a pile of small, boring flaws that everyone ignored because none of them matter alone, and it chains them together in ways nobody thought to try. One bug might only let it peek at a sliver of computer memory. Another might only let it scribble a single byte somewhere on your disk. These things are useless apart. But chained together they get more interesting.
But now extrapolate and give the car burglar one more superpower: He never gets tired, and he can be in a thousand places at once. A normal burglar checks one house at a time. But Mythos checks every door on every street, all night long
That's it! How'd I do?
I think this explains why Mythos and Fable are so interesting. Fable can't do security stuff but it does have the ability to be a long-running agent that can chain together tasks to accomplish big goals