Anthropic audit found no 'serious' Zcash protocol bugs

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said a security audit by Anthropic's Claude Mythos model, requested by Shielded Labs, found no "more serious bugs" in the privacy-preserving cryptocurrency's protocol, he wrote in a post on X. On June 3, Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a vulnerability in the shielded pool; functionality was restored later that day through an emergency upgrade.

The issue stemmed from a four-year-old forgery bug in the Orchard shielded pool that security researcher Taylor Hornby discovered with help from Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 model. The Zcash Foundation said there was no evidence the vulnerability was exploited, no unauthorized value creation was detected, and user privacy was unaffected.

Anthropic released the first public version of its Mythos model, Fable 5, saying Mythos had uncovered more than 10,000 high or critical-severity vulnerabilities in "systemically important software," which raised concerns about public release.

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