Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said a security audit of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI model found no serious vulnerabilities in the privacy-preserving cryptocurrency’s protocol.
At the request of Shielded Labs, the Swiss-based nonprofit that supports the development of Zcash, an AI security audit found no “serious flaws” in the Zcash protocol, according to Saturday’s X publish from Wilcox.
On June 3, Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a vulnerability in the protected pool. Functionality was restored later that day with an emergency upgrade.
The problem stemmed from a four-year-old forgery bug in the protected Orchard pool discovered by security researcher Taylor Hornby with the help of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model. Zcash Foundation he said there was no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited, nor was any unauthorized value creation detected, while user privacy remained unaffected.
Source: Zooko Wilcox
AI models raise concerns about crypto security
While developers are using new artificial intelligence models to identify vulnerabilities, the technology is also raising security concerns throughout the crypto industry.
Anthropic on Tuesday released the first public version of its Claude Mythos model, Fable 5. The company said last month that the Mythos model had discovered more than 10,000 vulnerabilities of high or critical severity in “systemically important software,” leading to concerns about whether it should be made public.
Company he said to users that the Fable 5 has been “made safe for general use” and has safeguards that redirect some topics, such as cybersecurity, to another model, the Claude Opus 4.8.
On Friday, Anthropic said it had suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models due to a US government export control directive citing national security concerns.
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The proliferation of these new AI models has changed the cybersecurity playing field in favor of threat actors, causing a “vulnerability apocalypse” that is fueling the resurgence of decentralized finance (DeFi) hacking, said Mitchell Amador, CEO of bug-fixing platform Immunefi, in a recent interview with Cointelegraph.
Crypto hacks surged to $634 million in April, the highest monthly value since the Bybit hack led to losses of around $1.4 billion in February 2025, according to DefiLlama data.
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