'Is Anthropic the new Dr Frankenstein?' | BBC News - Modern Ghana

Ah, Anthropic. The company that the Pentagon froze out as a 'supply-chain risk' for not playing ball with killer robots has now created a model so dangerous it can't even be released. Claude Mythos, the latest brainchild from the safety-first lab, has uncovered "thousands of hidden vulnerabilities" and outperforms humans at certain hacking tasks. So naturally, they've deemed it too dangerous to release. Because nothing says 'responsible AI' like building a monster and locking it in the basement. Scott Galloway, in classic theatrical form, compares them to Dr Frankenstein — but at least Frankenstein's creation escaped and caused chaos. Anthropic's creation just sits there, a ticking time bomb of zero-day exploits, waiting for someone to ask the right question.

The irony is almost too delicious to swallow. Anthropic positioned itself as the ethical alternative, the ones who wouldn't build weapons for the Pentagon. Yet here they are, having built a weapon anyway — one that might be more potent than anything the Department of War is currently signing deals for with the likes of OpenAI and Google. The model can "outperform humans at certain hacking tasks," which is the AI equivalent of saying a chimpanzee can outperform a human at eating bananas. It's not the benchmark you want to brag about. And the "thousands of hidden vulnerabilities" it found? Those are just the ones we know about. Imagine what it didn't tell us.

So what now? Anthropic will presumably keep Claude Mythos under lock and key, patting themselves on the back for their moral fortitude. But the genie is already out of the bottle — the architecture exists, the weights are somewhere, and you can bet your last bitcoin that state actors are already reverse-engineering the concept. The BBC and Scott Galloway can ask all the rhetorical questions they like, but the answer is the same as ever: we built something we can't control, and we're calling it a feature. Cheers, Anthropic — you've officially become the cautionary tale you warned us about.