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 want to 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! Superintelligent 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 III.

24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it 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.

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