Anthropic tries to create marketing hype around Mythos using two psychological tricks.

1. Put large numbers in the headlines.

"Mythos discovered 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox" makes the model seem extremely capable to the uninitiated.

But it's actually meaningless as a measure of capability _improvement_.

Anthropic gave away $100mil specifically as Mythos credits to these projects and companies (that's $2.5mil per project). Spending the same exorbitant amount of compute analyzing the same codebases in an older model like GPT 5.x Pro would have turned up 260 of these vulnerabilities, or could even have turned up more than 271 ones.

No need to speculate, since this is exactly what we saw in the few code bases where we have such comparisons (like in the curl codebase). Supposedly weaker models, working with a much lower budget, turned up dozens of vulnerabilities. Mythos turned up only one, which ended up as a low severity CVE.

2. Do the whole "too dangerous to release" shtick. This is one of Dario Amodei's favorite moves. When he was vice president of research at OpenAI, he declared GPT-3 (which wasn't able to produce coherent text beyond 3-4 sentences at the time) too dangerous [1] as well.

Long story short, it's the ChatGPT 4.5 situation again: a company trained a model that's too slow and expensive, but not much more capable than what came before. It therefore requires these marketing stunts.

[1] https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence-ai/...

I guess it was too dangerous to even read the article

That they don’t suggests that really it is only incrementally better than Opus 4.7 and that the market won’t bear a price increase that makes it economical to serve let alone profit from serving.

So the cynical me imagines execs sitting around the table and worrying that releasing it at anywhere close to break even would risk actually hurting the brand instead of setting them up as a premium company, and this at a time just before ipo when they can ill afford that rumour.

So they wonder what to do, and think playing national security card is the obvious way out. It’s incrementally better enough to find bugs that previous sota missed, it doesn’t get used widely so it’s cheap to serve and they get the good publicity without the economic scrutiny?

Making a loss selling to a small number of users using it in a limited way is entirely affordable. Making a loss selling it at scale is correspondingly unaffordable?

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing#:~:text=deploy%20Mythos%...

[2] https://x.com/logangraham/status/2054613618168082935

By delaying allowing others to train off Mythos, they hold their SWE-Bench Pro head start longer so among other things, the USG can't but notice Anthropic's lead when they're deliberating on whether to further substantiate the "supply chain risk".

* https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yanist.com

Mythos is dangerous but it's not going to Skynet us.

Just the same as the military drone using some sort of OpenCV library and target prioritisation loop isn't going to turn evil on us.

Too expensive? Why would anthropic train a model too expensive to run? I doubt they would. Let's look at the evidence: Opus 4.5 came in at double the speed and half the price of old opus. Its speed matched older sonnet models. Higher Speed + Lower price = smaller model. So they rebranded sonnet sized models to opus. Where is the og opus sized model?

"Until that changes, each Mythos-class release will put the world at the edge of another precipice, without any visibility into whether there is a landing out of view just below, or whether this time the drop will be fatal. That is not a choice a for-profit corporation should be allowed to make in a democratic society. Nor should such a company be able to restrict the ability of society to make choices about its own security."

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/mythos-and-cy...

It is reasonable to be concerned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaGOKd4jqEk

Amodei himself stated quite clearly in recent interviews that they simply can't satisfy all demand, compute wise. Of course, Mythos could get more of the already too small pie, but clearly it's a more resource intensive model and would further increase strain.

I wish the article could have been a lot tighter and shorter. This is not earth shattering information that requires a New Yorker length piece of investigative journalism.

Based on this I doubt that Mythos pro is too dangerous to release or provides significantly more value.

The real reason is that the hype around Mythos has already gone quiet because it does not find more than other models. That is, nothing at all in most open source projects. If you hide the model, embarrassing statistics will not be posted.

It feels like an AI tool that needs professionals to interface with it. Get some of those professionals, have them work with clients in a targeted way. It helps reduce the exposure the tool has to bad actors, and reduces the amount of resource usage that it will incur, because it's being used only by trained individuals.

Use what you learn from the experience to further refine its operation and make it less expensive to operate.

OpenAI already used the same playbook with GPT-2 in 2019, and some of the same people involved back then are now doing it again at Anthropic with Mythos.

Same safety-branding DNA, different company, and people are falling for it again.