Is Claude Mythos “Terrifying”? | AI Reality Check

Anthropic recently announced a new LLM named Claude Mythos. They claimed it was so good at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities and source code that they couldn't release it to the general public for fear that our infrastructure as we know it would be hacked and collapsed. Now, as I'm sure Anthropic hoped, this announcement generated a lot of attention. Here's what Thomas Friedman said in his widely read New York Times column. Normally, right now, I would be writing about the geopolitical implications of the war with Iran, but I wanna interrupt that thought to highlight a stunning advance in artificial intelligence, one that arrives sooner than expected and that will have equally profound geopolitical implication. Friedman then goes on to conclude, and I'm quoting him here, holy cow, super intelligent AI is arriving faster than anticipated. Basically, the mood of much of the Internet right now about Claude Mythos is that Anthropic just invented the Whopper supercomputer from the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie, War Games. Well, the Whopper spends all its time thinking about World War three. Twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year, plays an endless series of war games using all available information on the state of the world. But here's the key question. How much of this is actually true? Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for an AI reality check episode, so this is the perfect opportunity to look closer at these claims. Now here's my plan. I went out and read basically every independent test or assessment that I could find about Mythos and or its reported capabilities. I read all these reports, so you don't have to. And I'm going to bring out of all of this reading the key observations that you need to know. The reality, as you'll soon learn, is not nearly as simple as the ghost story that Anthropic is trying to convince us to believe. All Alright. We have a lot to cover in this episode, so let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music. Alright. So what's really going on with Claude Mythos? Well, at the core of the concerns surrounding Mythos, if you talk to an average, nontechnical person who's been following this story, they will say, here's how they understand it. That when, Anthropic trained up this new model, it displayed a new cybersecurity capability that surprised them. Oh my god. This thing can find vulnerabilities and attack systems right now, causing Anthropic then to have to hastily pull back their plan to release the model to the public. That's how most people understand this story. But that narrative is not correct. Security researchers have been using LLMs to find security vulnerabilities and program exploits since basically the beginning of consumer LLMs. This is not a new capability that emerged in Claude Mythos. …