AI and software security: the slop is now signal

No matter how you feel about AI, it’s changing the world of software. The “T” in ChatGPT was invented to improve language translation, and large language models (LLMs) are very good at this. Interestingly, translating between French and Japanese is effectively the same as translating between English and Python for these systems. As LLMs improve, we’re also finding that there’s little difference between “help me fix mistakes in this document”, and “find the flaws in this codebase”. LLMs are now great at both tasks, but the latter has much larger implications. Last month, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos, a next generation model which shows a significant leap in performance over currently available models. During testing, Anthropic noticed that the model was also much better at finding software flaws. The biggest improvements here come from identifying chains of issues which can be combined to produce a larger effect. Because of this, they decided not to release the model to the…