The rules of digital warfare just fundamentally changed. For years, cybersecurity relied on human analysts hunting through code to find flaws before hackers did. It was slow, tedious work.
Now, artificial intelligence does that work in seconds. Meanwhile, you can explore related stories here: The Hundredth Shield and the Men Who Forge It.
When Anthropic released its Mythos model, Washington panicked and quickly blocked its export. Mythos isn't just another chatbot; it treats software code like text, automatically scanning entire enterprise systems to discover critical vulnerabilities. Even worse, it can figure out how to weaponize those flaws. Zhou Hongyi, the billionaire founder of Chinese cybersecurity giant 360 Security Technology, didn't mince words at the ISC.AI conference in Beijing. He called these models "cyber nuclear weapons."
If you don't have one, you're essentially blind. To see the full picture, we recommend the recent report by The Verge.
Zhou warned that China faces a terrifying reality of "one-way transparency." If American actors possess tools like Mythos to probe Chinese critical infrastructure at will, while Chinese teams lack the same capability, the strategic balance breaks completely. You can't defend an economy when your adversary has an automated flaw-finding machine and you're still relying on humans with spreadsheets.
The Yitian Tulong Strategy
Instead of waiting for Chinese base models to catch up to US giants, 360 launched its own offensive and defensive AI toolkit named Yitian Tulong. The name comes from a classic Chinese martial arts novel, translating to "Heavenly Sword and Dragon Saber."
The suite splits into two core pieces:
- Tulongfeng: The direct answer to Mythos. It's an AI agent designed specifically for automated software vulnerability discovery.
- Yitianzhen: An automated defense system built to handle incident response and patch systems without human intervention.
360 claims that Tulongfeng has already surfaced 3,432 software vulnerabilities. Out of those, Chinese state authorities have officially confirmed 105. While Western analysts treat these numbers with skepticism, the message to Beijing is clear: automated vulnerability hunting works, and it works fast.
Cheating The Chip Ban
Everyone knows Chinese AI labs face massive headwinds. Thanks to US export controls, getting the latest Nvidia silicon is nearly impossible. Zhou openly admitted that domestic Chinese models lag behind American equivalents by 20% to 30% in raw base capability.
So, how do you build a cyber nuke when you lack the best chips?
You stop chasing the "genius hacker" model.
US Strategy: Strongest Base Model + Elite Hardware = Genius AI Hacker
360 Strategy: 30% Weaker Model + Specialized Security Databases + Automation Pipelines = Professional AI Team
360 isn't trying to build a massive, all-knowing large language model that requires ten thousand locked-up chips. Instead, they use smaller, highly specialized models and wrap them in what they call an "agent approach." They plug the model directly into massive proprietary vulnerability databases, threat intelligence feeds, and automated scripting pipelines.
Think of it like this: the US is trying to train a single, hyper-intelligent prodigy. China is building an automated assembly line of specialized workers who never sleep, operate 24 hours a day, and make fewer execution mistakes. By focusing the AI strictly on security logs and code syntax, they bypass the need for a massive, multi-purpose frontier model.
The Reality of Automated Offense
The panic over Mythos-class technology isn't exclusive to Beijing. Cybersecurity leaders from the Five Eyes nations have spent months warning that AI-driven attacks on critical infrastructure are closer than people think.
When an AI can discover a zero-day vulnerability, write the exploit code, and launch the attack in minutes, traditional defense collapses. The old playbook of waiting for a breach, analyzing the malware, and deploying a patch over three weeks is dead.
If you want to protect your network, you need an AI agent that scans your own code constantly, finding the holes before the adversary's AI does. 360's move signals that the cybersecurity sector is no longer about selling antivirus software. It's an arms race of automated code analysis.
If you're managing enterprise risk right now, you need to audit how your software vendors verify their code. Relying on periodic manual penetration testing is no longer a viable security posture. You need to start integrating automated, static code analysis tools directly into your deployment pipelines. If the tech teams aren't using machine learning to audit your proprietary software stacks today, you are leaving the door open for automated exploitation tomorrow.
