This month Anthropic announced Mythos, an AI model the company says is too dangerous to release publicly. Scientific American, ‘What is Mythos and why are experts worried about Anthropic’s AI model.’ Mythos can autonomously find zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system, chain them into working exploits, and cover its tracks. The UK’s AI Security Institute found it succeeded on expert-level hacking tasks 73 percent of the time. No AI before April 2025 could complete those tasks at all.

Access is being limited to a handful of tech and financial firms under Project Glasswing, and the Treasury Secretary convened senior US bankers this month to discuss it. Euronews, ‘Hackers breach Anthropic’s too dangerous to release Mythos AI model,’ reporting on both the third-party breach and the Treasury meeting. The concern isn’t just nation-state adversaries. Mythos itself was already breached through a third-party vendor. The next version, or someone else’s equivalent, will land in more hands. When that happens, financial infrastructure will be exposed in ways it never has been before.

Most of what I own lives on a server somewhere. Bank accounts. Investment records. Mortgage documents. Tax history. Personal devices matter too. A compromised laptop can give attackers a path into my accounts. But that surface I can harden. What I can’t control is whether the institutions holding my money and assets stay secure. Each has defenders. The defenders have been adequate so far because attackers were human and slow. Mythos is a preview of what happens when they are neither.

There is one class of record no remote AI can touch: the one printed on paper and sitting in a drawer. It doesn’t have to be everything. Just enough to reconstruct the truth if digital records are corrupted, frozen, or held for ransom. Account numbers. Recent statements. A list of holdings. Beneficiaries. Paper serves as proof—in a world where an institution’s systems may be down or lying—that I am who I say I am and that what I own is what I own.

For a long time, going paperless was the obvious choice. More convenient. Lower costs. Saving Trees. The assumption was that digital was safer than paper because it had backups. But digital backups are still digital. They can be corrupted, encrypted, or deleted alongside the originals. Mythos sharpens what was already true. Paper isn’t safer because it’s better. It’s safer because it’s not on the network.

I’ll be printing a few things now. I suggest you do the same.

This article was developed with AI assistance for research, outlining, drafting, and editing. All ideas, experiences, and perspectives are my own.