Anthropic's Most Powerful AI Mythos Assists Experts in Discovering Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Apple macOS 26.4.1

Security experts used Anthropic's most powerful AI model Claude Mythos to successfully escalate privileges in Apple's macOS 26.4.1 system. Starting from a normal local account, researchers combined two vulnerabilities to finally obtain a root shell and bypass the Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) protection mechanism on Apple Silicon devices.

A root shell refers to the highest-privilege command-line access in the system; obtaining it means attackers can modify system configurations, access restricted directories, etc. MIE is a hardware security mechanism deployed by Apple based on ARM's memory tagging capabilities, aiming to reduce the probability of vulnerability exploitation.

This attack was completed by human researchers and AI together: Mythos assisted in identifying vulnerability categories and accelerating the research process. The research team has reported the results to Apple's headquarters, but specific details have not been released yet as Apple is still reviewing the vulnerabilities.