First Apple M5 memory exploit discovered using Anthropic AI, gives root access on MacOS — Claude Mythos helps security researchers bypass Memory Integrity Enforcement
A security research team named Calif has discovered the first memory exploit on Apple's M5 chip, enabling local privilege escalation to root on macOS. The exploit bypasses the Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) feature, a hardware-level security mechanism designed to prevent common memory corruption attacks. The vulnerability was disclosed to Apple in advance and is part of a series of AI-assisted findings using Anthropic's Mythos Preview.
- ▪The exploit allows a standard user to gain root access on macOS by running a simple command.
- ▪It successfully bypasses MIE, a hardware-enforced security feature on M5 and A19 chips based on ARM MTE.
- ▪The research was conducted using Anthropic's AI model Mythos Preview and tested on macOS 26.4.1 with an Apple M5 machine.
- ▪Calif disclosed the vulnerability to Apple before public release as part of their 'Month of AI-Discovered Bugs' initiative.
- ▪MIE is designed to prevent memory-related exploits like buffer overflows and use-after-free with minimal performance impact.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 5 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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| Original publisher | Tom's Hardware |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/apple-m5-architecture-suffers-first-privilege-escalation-exploit-anthropics-claude-mythos-helps-researchers-bypass-memory-integrity-enforcement |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T11:05:18.253Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T11:05:18.253Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | HobjkORsYbpr · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Tech Industry Cybersecurity First Apple M5 memory exploit discovered using Anthropic AI, gives root access on MacOS — Claude Mythos helps security researchers bypass Memory Integrity Enforcement News By Bruno Ferreira published 16 May 2026 AI-assisted security research is producing exploits at a frightening rate. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Getty Images) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Thanks to AI-assisted security research, hackers with hats of various colors are finding exploits everywhere.
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