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“Too dangerous to release” or just too expensive?
- paol_taja 5mo agoThe "too dangerous to release" line was definitely a marketing stunt. 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.
- metadat 5mo agoSame people, actually. It’s a Dario move.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoChatGPT literally tells people to kill themselves but apparently that’s not too dangerous and this is. It’s bad enough that it’s a marketing stunt, totally agree with you. But in the face of what we have seen and how they act like it’s no big deal, it’s just gross.
- dascrazy_96 5mo agoits pretty obvious they just dont have the compute for it.
- repelsteeltje 5mo ago... and the safety argument is a great way of saying "no" disguised as a "yes, if ..." to your prospects.
- stldev 5mo agoThis. Astonished to see so many bright people on HN taking the bait, especially from a company whose gone to such lengths to screw over their paying customers. They're a commodity provider. They're no more special than any of the others, and it's just a matter of time before their trillion parameter models are running on my watch. So, of-course they're trying to snatch up giant, long-term contracts now while they hype the hell out of another minor incremental improvement. And we'll be paying the price to all the Enterprises that lock in, only to wake up a week from now and realize there is another player with a better product.
- djvu97 5mo ago> Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later. I guess it was too dangerous to even read the article
- redanddead 5mo agoMythos took it down
- spzb 5mo agohttps://archive.is/31PFC https://archive.is/31PFC
- aleph_minus_one 5mo agoOn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094138 Imustaskforhelp explained why one should better post archive.org links instead of archive.is links. So, here an archive.org link: > https://web.archive.org/web/20260515135354/https://kingy.ai/ai/too-dangerous-to-release-or-just-too-expensive-the-real-reason-anthropic-is-hiding-its-most-powerful-ai/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260515135354/https://kingy.ai/...
- angra_mainyu 5mo agoThe HN hug of death
- timpera 5mo agoIt's somehow nice to see an old-school HN hug of death once in a while, it has become a rare sight since most links are now to big platforms or to websites behind Cloudflare.
- manincharge 5mo ago[dead]
- 5mo ago
- marginalia_nu 5mo agoJesus has microwaved a burrito so hot he can not eat it, refuses to show the world, citing dangerous omnipotence paradox.
- lgcmo 5mo agoMythos had to silence you apparently
- dwa3592 5mo agoSilenced immediately.
- wood_spirit 5mo agoMy thinking is that if it really was super duper then Anthropic could charge eye watering amounts and have willing customers and set up expectations going forward that SOTA costs a lot to use. 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?
- cbg0 5mo agoThey announced the pricing when they released preview: $25/$125 per million input/output tokens. I have no doubt they're already selling it to select customers.
- ed_elliott_asc 5mo agoIt all sounds a bit too marketing-ey to me “we have this amazing model that is too good to release” but the goal is still AGI? Ok right.
- estearum 5mo agoWhat's incoherent about that?
- upmind 5mo agoThe goal for anthropic is safe AGI. A) this model is dangerous in the hands of consumers. B)They do not want China to train on these models.
- 9x39 5mo agoThe missing piece is the reminder that scarcity still exists. Whether its actually scarcity or hype building or a bit of column a, bit of column b is TBD. Then again, the new models seem more expensive, they slashed the tokens thrown around in thinking, and put up limit speedbumps so it’s probably not all gaslighting about compute bottlenecks.
- crudgen 5mo agoFor marketing purposes it is always too dangerous, not saying it is safe
- tomaytotomato 5mo agoAI has always been dangerous, but not existentially dangerous. 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.
- estearum 5mo agoYeah we have literally no examples of more intelligent beings accidentally or purposefully wiping out less intelligent beings. Any time such a scenario could have conceivably happened, the less intelligent beings were able to foresee the methods, mechanisms, and motivations of the more intelligent beings and were able to counteract it.
- repelsteeltje 5mo agoI get the sarcasm, but what about Neanderthals versus Homo Sapiens?
- miroljub 5mo agoIf we look at our human history, there are millions of examples where less intelligent beings destroyed highly advanced civilizations. It was never about intelligence, but about willingness to destroy (willingness to defend is not enough). Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, China, ... I won't mention current examples ...
- estearum 5mo ago1. "Less advanced civilization" != less intelligent people 2. The outcome of near-peer competition is surely highly dependent on factors like brutality, luck, tactics etc... the competition between the defenders of crops (i.e. makers of pesticides) and insects is not. Not only are the insects destroyed en masse successfully, but neither side even recognizes itself as party to a competition. The insect has no conception of a crop, even when he walks in it, much less a pesticide, even when he tastes it. The pesticide sprayer assigns zero moral valence to his daily genocide. Do you have a reason to believe the gap between AI (not LLMs specifically, but AI generally) and human intelligence will peak near the difference between human competitors (what... 20-30 IQ points)? If so, please share why you believe this.
- 22spaj 5mo agoThis lengthy article by a self-described "AI enthusiast" muddies the waters. Yes, Anthropic has capacity constraints, which is why they rented Colossus from Musk despite the danger of being distilled. 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.
- holysoles 5mo agoThe thought of this didn't even cross my mind until yesterday. I previously figured the hype was primarily around marketing, but after watching this Primagen video, I have the same suspicion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaGOKd4jqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaGOKd4jqEk
- andix 5mo agoIs it possible that curl just doesn't have any critical security vulnerabilities left?
- miroljub 5mo agoMy guess is they are still in the "fake it till you make it" phase. There's no Mythos, it's just a hype machine fueled by a hot air.
- jasonjmcghee 5mo agoIt's on bedrock and in use by companies
- miroljub 5mo ago"Something" is in use.
- whyenot 5mo agoIt's probably a little of both: dangerous and expensive. This article makes a good case that the cost is at least part of the reason. 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.
- urikaduri 5mo agoAlso dangerous is expensive. If you cause damage you sometimes need to pay for it.
- GrinningFool 5mo agoThis was nothing like investigative journalism; it's just LLM spew. It could have been written in a handful of paragraphs.
- vrganj 5mo agoThe real Mythos was the friends we made along the way.
- goldenarm 5mo agoWhen your logo is AI, your illustrations are AI, and you profile pic is AI, I'm going to assume the text is AI too and won't read it.
- srdjanr 5mo agoI read it, and it is AI
- jorisw 5mo agoI don't think it is. Just the (somewhat lame) graphics are.
- Zambyte 5mo agoThe text is very obviously heavily authored using AI. The more interesting question is: did a person even prompt an LLM to write on this subject? It seems likely that someone set up an agent using OpenClaw or something to just automatically write articles on popular topics in AI, and this is something that it came up with
- gpugreg 5mo agoSorry to say, but it almost certainly is AI. - 51 EM-dashes - Section headings - Excessive repetitions: "The [...] are real. The [...] are real. The [...] is real. All three things are true at once." - Excessive use of "genuine", "genuinely", "honest", "real", "true" - Excessive use of "gap": "near-term gap", "the Compute Gap", "the Narrative Gap", "critical gap" - Corny and meaningless closing sentence: "Understanding both parts is the beginning of taking AI deployment decisions seriously."
- hugh-avherald 5mo agoI don't believe my 20 year old university essays were written by AI, despite your criteria.
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- micromacrofoot 5mo agoIt's probably not much more dangerous than all the AI security patching being done without it, CVE rate is approaching a straight line up
- yanis_t 5mo agoMy posts* got to the first spot on hackernews couple of times. Never once it broke down like that. And why would it, it's just a bunch of html and css files served through (free) vercel (don't think it matters). I wonder what do people run their blogs these days, so they fail under the pressure so easily. * https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yanist.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yanist.com
- timpera 5mo agoIt's WordPress, which is a great CMS but can quickly crumble under load when using cheap hosting.
- yanis_t 5mo agoSo I assume it's because it's not statically build, but requires a DB connection all the time?
- timpera 5mo agoYes, with the recent waves of AI scrapers I have noticed on my own WordPress websites that the DB seems to the weak point when under load. Cache plugins can help a lot with this.
- andix 5mo agoWith an external cache/CDN it should work perfectly fine. There are also some caching plugins for wordpress, but most of them still hit the database on every request.
- VladVladikoff 5mo agoCheap shared hosting will throttle sites which get too much traffic.
- einszwei 5mo agoOpus Fast Mode is 30$/150$/M Input/Output cost. Mythos's pricing (from model card) is 25$/125$ Input/Output cost. Based on this I doubt that Mythos pro is too dangerous to release or provides significantly more value.
- hsuduebc2 5mo agoAs far as my understanding goes. It is not a breakthrough model itself but finetuned model with right tools and skills. Fairly similiar to today's coding agents with difference that they are made for software engineering not cyber security.
- ACCount37 5mo agoMythos is the next point on the scaling curve. It has considerably more parameters than most frontier models of today. Which gives it a lot more oomph per token. Is it a "breakthrough" as in "something novel and unexpected"? No. Is it a "breakthrough" as in "something we know works, but made to work on a greater scale"? Very much so.
- hsuduebc2 5mo agoSo it's just a bigger model? Like for example todays 1T models?
- ACCount37 5mo agoSupposedly 10T scale. Literally the next big thing. A bit like what OpenAI tried with GPT-4.5 - but Anthropic actually made it work with MoE, reasoning, tool use, RLVR, etc. It matters because the "g factor" of today's LLMs is at least in part a function of raw scale. Larger models are just smarter - assuming you can handle the training and inference at this increased scale.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoSo, realistically, how much further can this go? How many more orders of magnitude?
- lenerdenator 5mo agoI'd be tempted to offer this as a consultant service were I at Anthropic. 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.
- waynecochran 5mo agoConclusion: both are true which makes sense. The KV cache scaling yields both the emergent power and requires the enormous capacity.
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoWhich does sort of hint at a (power/profitability) ceiling on the LLM line of AI… That should make the industry nervous.
- ACCount37 5mo agoDoes that follow at all? High end AI is at its most useful when you use it to replace high end human labor. You can't buy 9000 cybersec specialists on demand, but you can buy more Mythos tokens. Then we get into all the scaling curves. Such as: LLMs getting more capable per FLOP, per byte of weights, per byte of VRAM, etc. And: inference compute getting cheaper over time. I see a lot of "should make the industry nervous", but when you try to dig into it? It's wishful thinking, every fucking time.
- waynecochran 5mo agoAs the article states, right now Anthropic does not have the compute capacity. I suppose they could charge an enormous amount of money, but if it is indeed that powerful there are folks that would pay and they would degrade everything. To make matters worse, bad actors could use it to find zero-day exploits in the power grid and banking system.
- smca 5mo ago(I work at Anthropic) We have publicly stated[1] that our goal is to deploy Mythos-class models at scale when we have the requisite safeguards for offensive cyber risks in place. Mythos is a general frontier model, not a cyber-specific model so there are many reasons why we think our users will benefit from access (with the aforementioned safeguards in place) in due course. Compute has also not factored into our decision[2] to rollout the model in a limited fashion to defenders. We'll be sharing more soon on the first month or so of the project and rollout. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing#:~:text=deploy%20Mythos%2Dclass%20models%20at%20scale https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing#:~:text=deploy%20Mythos%... [2] https://x.com/logangraham/status/2054613618168082935 https://x.com/logangraham/status/2054613618168082935
- saidnooneever 5mo agono risk is added. all risk is already maxed out. release it.
- yanis_t 5mo agoAre there any publicly verifiable sources that Mythos is that much more intelligent than Opus, so to be considered much more dangerous (as it is presented in the public discourse by Anthropic)
- empath75 5mo agoIt doesn't have to be _much more intelligent_ than Opus to be a risk. It doesn't even need to be _more intelligent_. It just needs to be _better at finding security problems_. Which could happen from just minor improvements in training data, or the harness, etc. Even a small improvement could shift it from finding very few new security holes, to reliably finding many at scale.
- enraged_camel 5mo agoYeah, I think a lot of the disconnect here is that people think of "model intelligence" as some sort of IQ score, rather than a combination of scores that measure abilities at a large variety of domains.
- hsuduebc2 5mo ago[flagged]
- WarmWash 5mo agoYou don't have to look much further than marketing...
- saithound 5mo agoIt's pretty clear at this point that Mythos' capability to discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities at scale is but an incremental improvement over existing models like the ones available to OpenAI's Plus/Pro subscribers. 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/361603/openai-tool-previously-thought-too-dangerous-for-the https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence-ai/...
- jorisw 5mo agoYou're not really responding to the piece at all.
- saithound 5mo agoIt's an AI-written slop article, which is hugged to death by HN in any case. It claims to be an evidence-based investigation, but basically invents the contents of the documents they supposedly investigated, such as the Anthropic Frontier Red Team writeup, from whole cloth. I don't think deeper engagement with it would promote good discussion.
- manincharge 5mo ago[dead]
- hiroto_lemon 5mo ago[flagged]
- jorisw 5mo agoI found this an illuminating piece, though I don't think percentages needed to be assigned between "is it about cost" vs "is it about security"
- daft_pink 5mo agoIt’s obvious that this is a campaign to pump their pending ipo. It may be too expensive, but it’s all about the ipo in my opinion.
- thadk 5mo agoArticle does not mention the other reason: in the interview with Dwarkesh, Amodei remarked about how other organizations are copying or training off Opus for their models. 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".
- netcan 5mo agoGood point. Precise motives are hard to work out as a general rule. Ultimately, it often comes down to a decision that decision makers like or don't like for a confluence of reasons.
- sherr 5mo agoWhatever the reason for "hiding" Mythos, it seems clear that these systems are getting very good at finding software security exploits. Mythos has made more people, even the US government, sit up and pay more attention. Regarding who should control the release of powerful systems like this, as Bruce Schneier and David Lie write in "Mythos and Cybersecurity" : "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-cybersecurity.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/mythos-and-cy... It is reasonable to be concerned.
- irthomasthomas 5mo agoI don't believe anything out of these startups anymore unless its backed by evidence. 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?
- jstummbillig 5mo agoThis makes it sound like some kind of open question or even mystery. 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.
- scihuber 5mo agoI've always wondered: what if China were deliberately using AI to search for vulnerabilities in critical government servers, for example in the EU.
- Salgat 5mo agoReminds me of the paper launches NVidia/Intel/AMD sometimes do where they announce some amazing tech (such as the old Titan GPUs) that placed their hardware at the top of the benchmarks, but with basically zero actual stock available.
- cubefox 5mo agoI think it's plausible that a substantial fraction of the increase in cyber attacks we saw recently was caused by GPT-5.5. So the "too dangerous" framing is plausible, even if the more important reason is a lack of RAM (as the article author suspects) or compute to serve Claude Mythos. We already know from other events that OpenAI is far less interested in AI safety and ethics than Anthropic.
- bethekidyouwant 5mo agotoo dangerous to release say engineers in only sector where this regularly happens.
- waffletower 5mo agoI am very concerned, particularly if Anthropic and/or other frontier model producers begin to hit an inference performance ceiling, that Anthropic will use its safety scare tactics to lobby for the marginalization of the open weight model ecosystem. As the open models catch up, or become "good enough", they may amplify their open model hostility "to protect their moat". I see Mythos and Glasswing as cynical beginnings of this. Also note that Google, Meta, and even OpenAI have released open weight models and have nodded to the obvious research benefits they provide, whereas the Anthropic "Public Benefit Corporation" has done no such public benefit. The valuation and success of Anthropic coupled with its "trust us and no one else" culture may be dangerous for the legal survival of open weight models.