Many of crypto’s biggest players are still waiting to gain access to powerful new AI models to strengthen their code from attacks, with only a select few having been able to get it. US crypto exchange Coinbase said in June that it had secured access to Anthropic’s restricted Mythos model and Zcash’s Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic used the model to audit the Zcash protocol at the request of Shielded Labs. Binance’s chief security officer Jimmy Su told Cointelegraph, “We have been trying to make inroads there. We also talked to other crypto exchanges and our own investors to try to make some progress. But we haven’t gotten the most frontier AI model, like Mythos.” The uneven access creates a new security divide in an industry where exploits can put billions of dollars at risk. Anthropic says Mythos 5 uses the same underlying model as its publicly available Fable 5, but without safeguards that restrict sensitive cybersecurity work. OpenAI operates a similar tiered system: verified defenders can use GPT-5.5 with “Trusted Access for Cyber,” while its more permissive GPT-5.5-Cyber model is reserved for a smaller group conducting authorized penetration testing. Su said Anthropic’s controlled rollout is a responsible approach because newly released models may benefit attackers faster than defenders, and a limited testing period could reduce the potential “blast radius.” However, Su said this calculation changes when competing models become more powerful and widely available