India’s open-code approach faces an AI stress test as new tools like Anthropic's Mythos expose hidden flaws

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Over the past decade, India’s digital economy has increasingly relied on open-source software to power its core digital infrastructure and governance systems. From banking to government platforms, the code behind payments and public services is shared, modular and visible.While this approach delivers scale, lower costs and reduced vendor lock-in, new AI systems developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and others are exposing its soft underbelly. Old unpatched gaps are showing up in widely used open-source software.

Anthropic’s Mythos, for instance, reportedly spotted a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD, an open-source operating system, that could be exploited to crash machines remotely. It also showed how seemingly minor bugs could be chained for a system-level attack on the Linux kernel, the backbone of most of the world’s servers. As a votary of open-source software, the crowd-developed sort that no business controls, India’s vulnerability is clear.

Digital infrastructure overseen by its central bank and payment rails run by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) rely on shared layers.Even where the top layer is proprietary, underlying systems are often shared across institutions. Thus, a gap in one place could expose others. Periodic audits, risk checks and compliance checklists will not suffice, since AI breaks that cadence.

Security-specific models like Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.4-Cyber can keep scanning systems for weak spots. Today’s urgency is to fix the flaws as soon as they are found. Most banks are not only burdened with complex tech stacks and legacy code, they tend to resist downtime for patch-ups.Those with the privilege of access to AI scanners would find them expensive to run,