Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said a security audit by Anthropic’s artificial intelligence model Claude Mythos found no serious vulnerabilities in the cryptocurrency’s privacy-preserving protocol.
Requested by Shielded Labs, a Switzerland-based nonprofit that supports the development of Zcash, the AI security audit found “no more serious flaws” in the Zcash protocol, according to a Saturday X post by Wilcox.
On June 3, Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a vulnerability in the protected pool. Functionality was restored later that day via an emergency update.
The issue arose from a four-year-old spoofing bug in Orchard’s protected pool that was discovered by security researcher Taylor Hornby with the help of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model. The Zcash Foundation said there was no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited, nor was any unauthorized value creation detected, while user privacy was not affected.
Fountain: Zooko Wilcox
AI Models Raise Crypto Security Concerns
While developers are using new AI models to identify vulnerabilities, the technology is simultaneously raising security concerns across the crypto industry.
On Tuesday, Anthropic released the first public version of its Claude Mythos model, Fable 5. The company said last month that the Mythos model discovered more than 10,000 high or critical severity vulnerabilities in “systemically important software,” raising concerns about whether it should be released.
The company told users that Fable 5 was “safe for general use” and has safeguards that redirect some issues, such as cybersecurity, to a different model, Claude Opus 4.8.
On Friday, Anthropic said it suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models due to a US government export control directive citing national security concerns.
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The proliferation of these new AI models has changed the cybersecurity playing field in favor of threat actors, causing a “vulnerability apocalypse” that is fueling a resurgence of attacks on decentralized finance (DeFi), Mitchell Amador, CEO of bug bounty platform Immunefi, told Cointelegraph in a recent interview.
Cryptocurrency hacks rose to $634 million in April, the highest monthly value since the Bybit hack caused losses of around $1.4 billion in February 2025, according to data from DefiLlama.
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