Anthropic says new Opus 4.7 is safer — and deliberately less powerful than its Mythos Preview

A cautious upgrade

Anthropic on Thursday unveiled Claude Opus 4.7, pitching it as a sharper tool for software engineering, instruction-following, practical tasks and file-system memory. But the company was frank: Opus 4.7 is “broadly less capable” than its more experimental Claude Mythos Preview, and its “cyber capabilities are not as advanced” than those of Mythos Preview, Anthropic said in a release. Short version: it’s better at getting real work done, and worse at the tricks that make security researchers both excited and nervous.

Safety by design

The firm says it trained Opus 4.7 to “differentially reduce” cybersecurity prowess, and added safeguards that automatically detect and block high‑risk or prohibited cyber requests. Anthropic encouraged bona fide security professionals to apply through a formal verification program if they need the model for legitimate testing. The message is baked into the product: power can be useful, but only if you can sleep at night afterward. Who’s right — the brakes or the horsepower? Anthropic is betting on brakes.

Context: Project Glasswing and the politics of power

Opus 4.7’s launch comes after Anthropic quietly rolled out Claude Mythos Preview to select companies as part of Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative that it has been reported that sparked a string of high‑level meetings between the White House, tech CEOs and banks. Anthropic doesn’t plan to make Mythos Preview generally available yet; instead, it says the goal is to learn how to scale safe deployment of “Mythos‑class” models. In other words: experiment in private, then maybe open the floodgates — eventually.

A reputational play

Since its 2021 founding, Anthropic has cultivated a safety-first image, positioning itself against rivals like OpenAI in the public eye. Opus 4.7 is the latest move in that strategy — a pragmatic product release wrapped in caution. For companies and security teams, it’s a tease: better tools arrive, but the most powerful ones remain under lock and key while Anthropic figures out how not to break the internet.

Sources: cnbc.com