Google wants to compete with Anthropic’s Mythos

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Tech TechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All Tech AI AIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All AI Anthropic AnthropicPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

FollowSee All AnthropicGoogle wants to compete with Anthropic’s MythosThe company is marketing its CodeMender tool as a way to “help secure the world’s code bases. ”The company is marketing its CodeMender tool as a way to “help secure the world’s code bases. ”by Hayden Field Hayden FieldSenior AI ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Technical Details

FollowSee All by Hayden FieldMay 19, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty ImagesPart OfGoogle I/O 2026: All the news and announcementssee all updates Hayden Field Hayden FieldPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by Hayden Field is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.

Google is making a big push into cybersecurity. At I/O, the company announced that it was inviting select groups of experts to test the API for CodeMender, an “AI agent for code security” it debuted last October. The difference is that Google is now making the tool more widely available externally — and marketing it as a way to, as Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu put it, “help secure the world’s code bases” by both flagging and fixing vulnerabilities.

Anthropic’s surprise Claude Mythos Preview announcement seemed to shock the AI world — and a ton of others, like top banks and the Federal Reserve chair. So, led by Anthropic’s news, a lot of companies have been following suit by offering their own versions of a powerful AI model designed to point out unknown security gaps in high-stakes systems. Anthropic made headlines for Mythos Preview being supposedly too powerful to release publicly, and it helped the company get back in the US government’s good graces after its supply chain risk designation and ensuing lawsuit.

Industry Implications

It also stands to make the company a lot of money if things go well with its early-access enterprise users and government agencies. So as the pressure builds for other companies to turn a profit ahead of potential IPOs, like OpenAI — or to stay in the lead of the ever-intensifying AI race, like Google — AI labs are seeing cybersecurity as a potential key revenue driver. OpenAI quickly followed suit with its own offering, and now, so has Google.

Kavukcuoglu confirmed to The Verge in an interview that Google has already been in discussions with governments and enterprises about using CodeMender to audit their systems.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.