Canadian Godfather of AI Yoshua Bengio says that the biggest problem with Anthropic not releasing Mythos - The Times of India

So Yoshua Bengio, the 'Canadian Godfather of AI,' has decided the 'biggest problem' with Anthropic's non-release of Claude Mythos isn't that it might be dangerously capable, but that the company 'gets to' decide who gets access. According to The Times of India, Bengio believes this creates a 'concentration of power' that could 'skew the development of the technology' – a wonderfully academic way of saying we're building private corporate fiefdoms with technology that could reshape society. One wonders if he's noticed that this is precisely the business model that's been funding his field for the last decade.

Bengio's solution, apparently, is not to demand more public oversight or open-sourcing, but to caution against open-source models entirely, warning of 'dangers' in their proliferation. It's a delightful bit of intellectual contortion: the problem is corporate control, but the solution is... more control, just of a different flavour. He manages to critique Anthropic's gatekeeping while simultaneously providing the perfect justification for it – a masterclass in having your existential risk cake and eating it too. The man who helped invent the modern AI stack now seems to be arguing that only the right people should be allowed to play with the toys.

This is the safety community's favourite parlour game: wringing hands about concentration of power while accepting the funding and infrastructure that creates it. Bengio's comments come just weeks after the White House was preparing to deploy a 'modified version' of Mythos for defense work despite an executive ban – a deployment we noted was proceeding with characteristic bureaucratic logic. So we have a top researcher warning about corporate control while the government quietly bypasses its own restrictions to weaponise the very model in question. The circle of AI governance is beautifully, depressingly complete.