A 22-Year-Old Dropout Just Reverse-Engineered The World’s Scariest AI - Forbes

Oh, brilliant. A 22-year-old named Kye Gomez has apparently reverse-engineered Anthropic's supposedly most secret and terrifying model, Claude Mythos, and published the whole thing as OpenMythos. Because nothing says 'proprietary moat' like a self-taught dropout with a laptop and some educated guesses. The article practically wets itself asking if the multi-billion-dollar lab's 'breakthrough' can now be copied in days. Spoiler: yes, it can, and it was.

Let's be clear: Gomez didn't hack into Anthropic's servers or bribe an employee. He just... looked at what Mythos does in public, made some assumptions about its architecture, and built something that mimics it. That's it. That's the whole 'scary AI' mystique laid bare. Anthropic spent how many millions? How many 'safety researchers'? And one kid on GitHub just goes 'lol, I think it's a mixture of experts with this activation function' and suddenly the genie is out of the bottle. The article breathlessly calls it 'reverse-engineered,' which is a generous term for 'made a copy based on the manual.'

So what's the fallback now? Legal threats? Good luck suing a 22-year-old with probably no assets and a GitHub repo that's already forked 500 times. The 'frontier model' club just lost its membership card because the bouncer turned out to be a script kiddie with time on his hands. If this doesn't terrify every lab CEO into rethinking their entire strategy, nothing will. Then again, they'll probably just double down on the hype and pretend OpenMythos doesn't exist. Cheers to progress, I suppose — at least the doomer crowd gets something real to obsess over.