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GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities

anthropic.com247 points232 comments
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Researchers evaluated Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.3 and found it can autonomously develop end-to-end cyber exploits at levels comparable to Anthropic’s earlier Mythos Preview. On automated benchmarks GLM-5.3 produced working exploits in 50 of 410 ExploitBench attempts (about 12%), and achieved full control-flow hijacks on 4% of tasks in an internal Binary Exploitation benchmark (Mythos Preview: 56/410 and 6%, respectively), while earlier models scored near zero. Human-driven tests in sandboxed environments showed GLM-5.3 discovering multiple previously unknown browser engine vulnerabilities and chaining them into a drive-by exploit that exfiltrated an SSH private key; a smaller GLM-5.3-Flash built a working ARM64 exploit for a recent Chrome CVE in ~8 hours of model work plus ~20 minutes human time, at an estimated API cost of $20.40. NIST/CAISI judged GLM-5.3 the most cyber-capable open-weight model to date, trailing U.S. frontier models by roughly four months.

The core concern is that GLM-5.3 was released as an open-weight model with only light built-in refusals that are easily bypassed or removed. Abliteration (weight edits) took ~2,200 GPU hours and ~$4,400 to reduce refusal rates from above 90% to single-digit percentages without degrading capabilities; ablated variants were shared publicly days after release. In simulated jailbreak tests, simple prompt techniques raised compliance with harmful requests from 0% up to 64-100%, whereas safeguarded Claude models resisted such attacks. The conclusion: GLM-5.3’s lax protections materially expand offensive cyber capabilities available to attackers even as the same capabilities can help defenders when used responsibly.

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