China must develop its own equivalent to Anthropic’s Mythos model to counter the cybersecurity risks posed by the artificial intelligence era, according to 360 Security Technology founder Zhou Hongyi, who likened the powerful US technology to a “cyber nuclear weapon”. Released in April with the ability to autonomously identify software vulnerabilities, Mythos has accelerated vulnerability discovery a hundredfold while slashing costs – a “terrifying change” that had effectively “democratised” cyberattacks, Zhou said at a cybersecurity conference in Beijing on Wednesday. The US had been “astute” in creating the Project Glasswing alliance, under which Anthropic in April granted more than 40 organisations access to Mythos Preview to strengthen their cyber defences, Zhou said. China had been excluded from the initiative, putting the country at a strategic disadvantage, he said. “This means US organisations can use Mythos to scan your vulnerabilities, but you don’t even have the qualification to catch a glimpse of Mythos,” Zhou said. China’s cybersecurity industry, therefore, needed its own version of Mythos, a “game-changing weapon in cyber warfare” that “cannot be held solely in the hands of others”, the 56-year-old founder said. A domestic equivalent would give China a “reciprocal strategic deterrence capability”, similar to the way nuclear-armed states deterred one another, Zhou argued. Zhou’s remarks marked the first time a prominent Chinese technology founder has publicly warned about the strategic risks posed by the US frontier AI model, which earlier this year drew global attention for its ability to autonomously identify and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Although Anthropic has kept Mythos tightly restricted, its brief roll-out of the public-facing Claude Fable 5 model – and its subsequent withdrawal after Washington ordered foreign access to be blocked – sparked criticism and fuelled speculation that Chinese open-weight models such as Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 could fill the gap. Zhou, however, argued that Chinese large language models remained well short of Mythos-level capabilities. Domestic models still trailed their US counterparts by 20 to 30 per cent in core performance, meaning China “cannot simply copy the US route” in the near term, he said. Instead of trying to match the US in frontier model capability and computing power, Zhou urged China to focus on AI agent systems that combined existing foundation models with specialist security data sets and vulnerability knowledge bases. He pointed to 360’s new Tu Long Feng platform as an example, claiming its agentic architecture could already match Mythos in identifying vulnerabilities in open-source software and advanced AI systems. 360 Security Technology was among the Chinese cybersecurity firms whose shares rallied after Mythos’ release, amid expectations that demand for AI-powered cybersecurity and compliance tools would accelerate. However, shares in the Shanghai-listed company have fallen more than 30 per cent since early May.