Anthropic expands Cyber Verification Program to three tiers

Anthropic's Cyber Verification Program is not new, but the expansion reshapes it into a graduated system. The three tiers — Defense Access, Red Team Access, and Special Access — are meant to match the scope of a security team's work, with different verification requirements and security controls applied at each level. Defense Access covers defensive work such as security operations centers, incident response, malware reverse engineering, and vulnerability analysis, and is aimed at nonprofits, universities, government security teams, and operators of critical infrastructure like regional hospitals and local government utilities.

Red Team Access goes further, permitting approved penetration testing and red team activities in addition to defensive use, for internal red teams, government red teams, and security and penetration-testing firms. Even there, operations that could cause harm or widespread disruption — deploying ransomware, damaging physical systems, or penetration-testing high-risk safety systems — remain blocked in real time, and testing is limited to authorized systems such as IT systems in critical industries. The third tier, Special Access, carries the fewest cyber blocks and is reserved for a limited set of verified organizations testing safety systems tied to aviation operations, power grids, telecom networks, interbank transfer infrastructure, and government administrative networks. Reviews for this level are conducted in cooperation with the U.S. government.

Organizations in the program are required to retain data in order to monitor cyber misuse, which sets up the coming change: Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, described as combining zero data retention with robust security, is slated for availability later this autumn, at which point eligible organizations will be able to store data in cloud infrastructure they manage themselves. Until then, organizations with access to zero-data-retention Claude Fable 5.1 or Claude Mythos 5.1 can use a zero-data-retention version of the program. The balance the program strikes is likely to be tested at the Special Access tier, where the fewest blocks meet the most sensitive targets, and where government screening is the gate.