Anthropic announced an expanded Cyber Verification Program (CVP) on October 6, 2026. The program gives verified cybersecurity professionals tiered access to advanced Claude models with progressively fewer safety restrictions for legitimate security work.
The CVP merges the former Project Glasswing and the earlier Cyber Verification Program into one unified offering. It operates through three access tiers: Defense Access, Red Team Access, and Specialized Access. Each tier requires different verification levels and security controls.
Defense Access targets security teams at companies, nonprofits, universities, governments, critical infrastructure operators, smaller security firms, open-source maintainers, and individual researchers with vulnerability disclosure track records. At this tier, Claude still blocks 46 out of 50 complex cyber tasks but allows defensive operations. Applications typically receive responses within days.
Red Team Access serves in-house red teams, government red teams, and professional penetration testing firms. This tier removes all blocks on offensive security scenarios and is limited to organizations only. The verification process takes weeks to complete.
Specialized Access provides minimal safeguards for verified organizations authorized to test safety-critical systems such as flight operating systems and power grids. Anthropic reviews these applications in collaboration with the U.S. government. Existing Project Glasswing members transition to this tier automatically without reapproval.
All three tiers include access to Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Mythos 5.1, and future models.
The results so far are significant. Project Glasswing partners identified more than 129,000 verified vulnerabilities between April and July 2026. Separately, Anthropic’s own open-source scanning found 5,500+ vulnerabilities between April and October 2026, with over 33,000 rated critical or high-severity across both efforts. Partners reported that the AI-assisted approach accelerated vulnerability discovery by months or years compared to traditional methods.
Security vendors including Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Accenture have already built cyber products on Claude Opus since May 2026. CrowdStrike’s consulting chief said that “frontier models like Anthropic’s Claude Opus are giving defenders a capability advantage that didn’t exist a year ago.”
Anthropic also announced a $35 million Defender Advantage Fund (0xDAF) that distributes Claude credits for patching live vulnerabilities in open-source projects, automating scanning approaches, and developing attack-resistant capabilities. Initial grant recipients will be named in the coming weeks.
