‘Too powerful for the public’: Inside Anthropic’s bid to win the AI publicity war
TL;DR
The firm says it withheld an AI model on cybersecurity grounds but sceptics say this was hype to lure investment This week, the AI company Anthropic said it had created an AI model so powerful that, out of a sense of overwhelming responsibility, it was not going to release it to the public. The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, summoned the heads of major banks for a chat about the model, Mythos. The Reform UK MP Danny Kruger wrote a letter to the government urging it to “engage with AI firm Anthropic whose new frontier model Claude Mythos could present catastrophic cybersecurity risks to the UK”. X went wild. Continue reading...
Nauti's Take
Anthropic withholding Mythos on safety grounds is either serious AI safety practice or a masterclass in PR – possibly both. The upside: if genuine, it normalizes the idea that not all capable models need public release, a healthy norm for the field.
The risk: if this is primarily attention-seeking, it cheapens actual safety arguments and makes regulators more cynical about industry self-restraint.
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