🥛 Claude Mythos vs. Crypto ⚔️

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that's like a backstage tour of the wildest market on earth.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ The "too dangerous" AI vs. Crypto.
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Matt Hougan: Crypto Is The Biggest Contrarian Bet In Markets Right Now.
🍪 Tom Lee: "People are really disappointed in crypto this year".

Bitso Business is hosting the biggest stablecoin conference in Latin America right in the middle of the FIFA World Cup. Use code SC_15off_9nd4 to get 15% off tickets.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

THE "TOO DANGEROUS" AI MIGHT LAUNCH TODAY (CRYPTO'S ON EDGE) 😰

Crypto Twitter spent this morning passing around the same rumor:

Anthropic might release the public version of its most powerful AI model today.

The model's called Mythos. The public version is reportedly getting rebranded as "Claude Fable."

It’s the same model Anthropic previously said was too dangerous to hand to the public.

And guess what: half way through editing this article - it dropped!

Source: Claude

Mythos is the most cyber-capable model Anthropic has built. In testing, it reportedly wrote working hacking exploits about 72% of the time, while older models sat near zero.

You simply point it at software and it hunts for zero-days on its own (a zero-day is a security hole nobody's found or patched yet).

In one restricted test it found 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox alone, including a bug that had been hiding in Mozilla's code for 15 years.

After that, Mozilla's monthly security patches jumped from 21 to 423.

It also turned up flaws in the encryption that secures most logins and connections across the internet.

And markets took note. When Mythos first leaked in March, cybersecurity stocks took it on the chin:

Cloudflare: -13%.
Thomson Reuters: -19%.
LegalZoom: -20%.

Hell - the S&P 500's software index dropped 2.6% in a single session. If those stocks flinched that hard, you can probably guess where crypto people's minds went next.

Let’s start with the good news…

STABLECOINS + SOCCER IN MEXICO CITY 🇲🇽

Two big events hit Mexico City on June 15-16:

The FIFA World Cup
The Stablecoin Conference 2026 by Bitso Business

This is the go-to event for stablecoins in Latin America and this year's lineup is stacked:

Patrick Witt (The White House)
Bo Hines (Tether)
Mike Belshe (BitGo)

You'll also hear from leaders at Visa, Mastercard, Citi, Western Union, PayPal/Xoom, Fireblocks, Bridge, Solana, Circle, Google and more.

Milk Road reader deal:

🏨 Book a 3 night hotel through their page → your ticket is free
🎟️ Just need a ticket? Use code SC_15off_9nd4 for 15% off

Grab your spot at Stablecoin Conference 2026

THE "TOO DANGEROUS" AI MIGHT LAUNCH TODAY (CRYPTO'S ON EDGE) (P2) 😰

Smart contracts are hard for even Mythos to touch, because once one is deployed it's locked in, and the big protocols audit them to death.

The exposure lies in everything wrapped around those contracts.

A DeFi app is basically just a website with a wallet attached, and websites get hacked.

Front-ends (public websites), browser extensions, bridges (the tools that move tokens between chains), and the servers holding private keys are all fair game.

An attacker who finds a zero-day there can slip in malicious code and drain wallets before anyone notices.

And DeFi's already hurting without any of this - more than $606M has been stolen in hacks since early April.

The worry is that a tool like Mythos could make those attacks faster and cheaper to run - with smaller, vibe-coded protocols (built fast, light on audits) are seen as the most exposed.

So why would Anthropic release this at all??

Source: Giphy

Well, the public version, Fable, is reportedly a defanged one.

It’s said to have shipped with heavier guardrails, weaker hacking ability, and built-in refusals on attack requests.

The full-power version stays locked behind ‘Project Glasswing’ - a program of roughly 200 vetted companies and governments, for defense only.

And defense is the part that’s most relevant to crypto - the same model that finds holes for attackers can also find them for the people doing the patching.

Anthropic's models already helped catch a counterfeiting bug in Zcash.

Point that at your own code and you close security holes first.

And if all of that’s not enough to calm your nerves, remember:

"Too dangerous to release" is a move the AI industry has run before, going back to OpenAI sitting on GPT-2 in 2019. 👇

Source: TechCrunch

Call your model dangerous → dominate the headlines → look responsible → then ship the public version once the safeguards (and the pricing) are ready.

So what actually happens from here?

We could see some short-term FUD and potential price chop while the market digests the release…

But past that, the likely path is AI-audited code becoming the norm, with the serious DeFi teams using these tools to harden their stuff faster than attackers can break in.

In the meantime, the boring move is the smartest one:

Revoke the token approvals you're not using (the permissions that let apps reach into your wallet).

Less token approvals = smaller attack surface.

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Is this one of crypto's most underrated real-adoption plays? XDC sits right where RWAs, cross-border payments, and institutional money are all colliding.*

Tom Lee: "People are really disappointed in crypto this year" - but as AI capabilities grow, so does the need for blockchain to "protect us from AI".

John Gillen: TVL, stablecoin supply, DEX volume - Ethereum leads on almost every metric except price... that's called bullish divergence.

Time to get cautious: Bonds say hike. Stocks say relax. We're stuck.

DeFi Saver turns Aave v4 into a trading bot for your loans: Stop losses, take profits, and one-click loan migration - we broke down the pros, cons, and fees so you don't have to.

*this is sponsored content.