Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox says Anthropic has reviewed the Zcash protocol with Mythos and did not find additional serious bugs after the recent Orchard security crisis. The review was request
Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox says Anthropic has reviewed the Zcash protocol with Mythos and did not find additional serious bugs after the recent Orchard security crisis.
The review was requested by Shielded Labs, with Mythos used to examine the protocol after the earlier AI-assisted discovery of a critical Orchard flaw. Zooko said Anthropic helped protect Zcash users, while Shielded Labs and other contributors are continuing security-hardening work. A separate community update said no serious vulnerabilities were identified and more details about the review will be shared in a future post.
The statement gives Zcash a fresh security update after one of the most intense weeks in the privacy coin’s history. The Orchard issue had already been patched through an emergency response, but the market remained focused on whether more serious weaknesses could exist inside Zcash’s shielded infrastructure.
The new review does not prove that Zcash has no remaining bugs. It does, however, add another layer of review around the protocol after the earlier vulnerability exposed how difficult zero-knowledge systems can be to audit, especially when privacy features intentionally hide internal transaction details.
The latest Mythos review follows the critical AI-assisted Orchard flaw that shook ZEC earlier this month. Taylor Hornby discovered the vulnerability on May 29 while conducting Zcash protocol research for Shielded Labs. The bug affected the Orchard zero-knowledge proof circuit and could have allowed invalid activity inside Zcash’s newest shielded pool.
The deeper concern was supply confidence. A post by Zooko Wilcox, Jason McGee and Taylor Hornby said the flaw could have been exploited in a local test environment to create unlimited, undetectable counterfeit ZEC inside Orchard. Because of Orchard’s privacy design, the post also said there is no purely cryptographic way to prove from existing pool data alone whether the flaw was ever exploited before remediation.
Zcash contributors moved quickly to close the vulnerability. Orchard transactions were temporarily disabled, then restored through the NU6.2 network upgrade with a corrected circuit. Zcash Foundation and ZODL statements said no unauthorized value creation had been detected, total ZEC supply remained intact through turnstile accounting, and user privacy was not affected.
That helped separate the operational fix from the market’s longer confidence issue. Zcash has since been moving toward a trustless supply-audit path that could give users stronger assurance about effective circulating supply without weakening the privacy model that gives ZEC its core purpose.
The Anthropic review also keeps Zcash at the center of the debate around AI-assisted security research. Mythos is Anthropic’s restricted high-capability model for cybersecurity and biology research, while Fable 5 is the more widely available Mythos-class model with additional safeguards. Anthropic says Mythos 5 remains available only to a small group of vetted partners through trusted-access programs.
That restricted-access model has become more relevant for crypto after the Orchard incident. Advanced AI systems can speed up defensive research, but they also raise the stakes for protocols with complex cryptography, smart contracts, bridges, wallets and consensus-critical code. Zcash is now one of the clearest examples of both sides of that shift: AI helped surface a major bug before known malicious exploitation, then another Mythos review was used to search for further serious protocol issues.
The timing also overlaps with Anthropic’s broader rollout of Mythos-class AI with cyber safeguards and the later shutdown of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after a U.S. export directive. Those developments put the same class of models at the center of two competing pressures: stronger defensive security work and tighter government control over who can access advanced cyber-capable AI systems.
Zcash still has work ahead. Shielded Labs has not yet published the full Mythos review, and the supply-integrity upgrade path remains a separate process. The immediate update is narrower but important for users and markets: after the Orchard patch, Anthropic’s Mythos review found no additional serious Zcash protocol bugs, while Zcash teams continue security hardening around the shielded system.
The post Zooko Says Mythos Audit Found No More Serious Zcash Protocol Bugs appeared first on Crypto Adventure.
