Kraken's parent company Payward has joined Anthropic's Project Glasswing, gaining access to Claude Mythos 5 — a frontier AI model designed to find and fix software vulnerabilities — as crypto exchanges race to deploy defensive AI against increasingly automated attackers.
Project Glasswing, launched by Anthropic in April 2026, allows selected firms to use restricted frontier AI models to secure critical software and infrastructure. Its membership already includes Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google and Microsoft, along with financial institutions such as JPMorganChase. Payward is the first crypto industry company publicly named in the initiative.
Deployment Plans
The Wyoming-based company said Monday it plans to deploy Mythos 5 across its environments in the coming weeks, with findings feeding into its existing security program. Vulnerabilities discovered in third-party open-source software will be disclosed to the relevant project maintainers — meaning the arrangement could benefit the broader crypto ecosystem beyond Kraken's own platform.
The move follows the US government making Mythos 5 available to American organizations that operate and defend critical infrastructure, according to Payward.
Claude Mythos 5 is Anthropic's most advanced model for defensive cybersecurity, built to analyze code at scale, identify vulnerabilities and help developers remediate them. Access has been deliberately limited while Anthropic develops safeguards for a broader rollout.
An Asymmetric Battle
Payward framed the investment as a response to a structural problem in security economics. "Security has always been an unfair game. An attacker needs to find one flaw. A defender has to find all of them, first, every single day," Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in the announcement. "Frontier AI is the first thing that flips that asymmetry."
The context is a threat landscape where AI is arming both sides. Attackers are using language models to find vulnerabilities faster, automate exploit development and run more convincing phishing and social-engineering campaigns — against an industry that remains one of the most targeted sectors in financial services. Exchanges, custody systems and settlement rails operate around the clock and hold directly stealable assets.
For crypto's incumbent exchanges, defensive AI is shifting from a research curiosity to table stakes. Kraken's entry into Glasswing signals that frontier-model security tooling — previously the province of big tech and megabanks — is now considered necessary infrastructure for running a major trading platform.