Zcash Gets Rare Relief As Mythos Finds No New Protocol Flaws

Anthropic's Claude Mythos AI found no further serious bugs in Zcash (ZEC), its founder said, weeks after a four-year-old flaw forced an emergency fix.

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Mythos Clears The Zcash Protocol

Founder Zooko Wilcox announced the outcome in a post on X, thanking Anthropic for the help and confirming the protocol came back clean. Shielded Labs, a Swiss nonprofit that funds Zcash development, requested the review and supplied the prompts that guided the model. The team promised more detail on the findings and the review in a later update.

Developers had spent the past two weeks with almost no room for error, scrambling first to contain the Orchard bug and then to prove the rest of the protocol held.

On Jun. 3, the team briefly paused Orchard shielded-pool transactions after catching the vulnerability, then reopened the pool the same day through an emergency soft fork. A hard fork the following day restored full function with a corrected circuit. No funds went missing, and the network created no extra coins.

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Hornby Flaw Reframes AI Audits

Researcher Taylor Hornby first exposed the forgery flaw on May 29, pointing Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 at the code within hours of that model's release. The bug had lurked in the Orchard pool since its 2022 launch, and could have let an attacker mint counterfeit ZEC without detection. The Zcash Foundation confirmed it found no evidence of an exploit, no unauthorized coins, and no harm to user privacy.

The result lands on a fault line running through the whole industry. AI tools now catch protocol flaws that human reviewers missed for years, yet they also hand a sharper weapon to attackers who reach the code first and move faster than defenders.

Zcash Endures A Brutal Stretch

Anthropic put the first public Mythos model, Fable 5, in front of users only days earlier, with guardrails that route cybersecurity prompts to Opus 4.8.

The company had said Mythos flagged more than 10,000 critical vulnerabilities in widely used software, a reach it had kept among vetted partners since April. On Friday, it disabled both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users under a US export control order it disputes and hopes to reverse.

The token rode out its own turbulence alongside the patch, capping one of the wildest stretches in the privacy coin's history. The disclosure briefly sank ZEC more than 50% and triggered roughly $100 million in liquidations, with trader Arthur Hayes dumping his entire stake before the coin clawed back much of the slide.

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