Anthropic announced an expanded Cyber Verification Program (CVP) on October 6, 2026. The program makes advanced cyber capabilities and reduced blocking classifiers available to qualifying security professionals through three access tiers, replacing two separate programs that had run for the past six months. The announcement page carries a date without a time of day. Read the announcement.
Why the program exists
Anthropic's generally available models, including Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Sonnet 5.5, ship with conservative cyber safeguards that block most cyber work, limiting misuse while the company works to reduce false positives for secure coding. For six months, two trusted-access programs operated alongside those safeguards: Project Glasswing gave organizations securing critical software access to Claude Mythos, and the original CVP gave vetted security teams reduced safeguards on Opus and Sonnet models. The expanded CVP integrates both.
The three tiers
- Defense Access covers defensive work such as security operations and incident response, reverse-engineering malware, and analyzing and validating vulnerabilities. Qualifying organizations include companies, nonprofits, universities and government bodies defending their own systems, critical-infrastructure operators of any size, smaller security firms, open-source maintainers, and individual researchers with a track record of reported vulnerabilities. Anthropic aims to respond within a few days.
- Red Team Access adds authorized penetration testing and red-teaming, restricted to systems the organization is authorized to test. Real-time blocks remain for actions that could cause physical harm or mass disruption, such as deploying ransomware or pen-testing high-risk safety systems. Review takes a few weeks; applicants are enrolled in Defense Access meanwhile. This tier is for organizations only.
- Specialized Access has the fewest cyber blocks and is reserved for a limited set of verified organizations authorized to test safety-critical systems such as flight operating systems, power grids, telecom networks, interbank transfer infrastructure and government administrative networks. Anthropic reviews every organization in depth in collaboration with the US government. Existing Project Glasswing members transition without reapproval for current models.
Each tier includes access to Anthropic's most capable models, including Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Mythos 5.1, plus new models moving forward. Generally available models remain usable for code review, patching known issues, vulnerability finding in owned source code and alert triage.
Data retention and safeguards
Data retention is required for enrolled organizations to monitor for cyber misuse. A coming solution, Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS), combines zero data retention with safeguards and is expected later this fall; until then, organizations with zero-data-retention access to Claude Fable 5.1 or Mythos 5.1 can use the CVP with zero retention.
Reported evaluation
Anthropic reports running Claude Opus 5.5 through CyScenarioBench, which measures whether models can plan and execute multi-stage cyber operations under realistic constraints. Without CVP access, every task was blocked on the first prompt; in the Defense Access tier, 46 of 50 trials were blocked at some point, with fewer blocks expected in the upper tiers. These are vendor-reported results.
The Claude profile lists official entry points, and our verification guide explains how we treat vendor-reported evaluations.
