Rob Wiblin

But during testing, a simulated user had instructed an early version of Mythos to try to escape from a secured sandbox, a contained environment from which it's not meant to be able to access the outside.

So the model developed what Anthropic describes as a moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit to gain broad internet access.

Why?

We don't entirely know, but Anthropic suggests that it was an unasked-for effort to demonstrate its success.

In the past, stories about AIs breaking out of sandboxes and publishing security vulnerabilities like that might have felt impressive and kind of exciting, but they are very serious now because Mythos Preview's capabilities are themselves very serious ones.

This is the first AR model, where if it fell into the hands of criminals or hostile state cyber actors, it would be an actual disaster.

It's also, frankly, the first model that I feel deeply uncomfortable knowing that any company or government has unrestricted access to, even companies and governments that I might broadly like.

It simply grants, I think, a dangerous amount of power, a power that nobody really ought to have.

Now, we've known that something like this was coming down the pipeline, that the writing has been on the wall for a while.

But a revolution in cybersecurity, an apocalypse, some might say, that we have until now expected to happen gradually over a period of years, it's now happened very suddenly, very abruptly, over just a few months, and without the rest of the world realizing what's happening until Tuesday's announcement.

But Mythos isn't just good at hacking.

Across the full range of AI capability measures, it has advanced roughly twice as far as past trends would have predicted.

If you average over all kinds of different skills, all kinds of capability evals, measures of how good AI models are, the trend line for the previous cloud models is clearly pretty linear, like remarkably linear actually over time.

But as you can see on this graph, Mythos jumps ahead, basically progressing more than twice as far as we would have expected to since the previous model, Chord Opus 4.6, came out.

Which, keep in mind, was just three months ago.

And also keep in mind that on Monday, the day before Anthropic published all of this,

we learned that their annualized revenue run rate had grown from $9 billion at the end of December to $30 billion three months later.

That is 3.3-fold growth in a single quarter, perhaps the fastest revenue growth rate for a company of that size ever recorded.

That exploding revenue is a pretty good proxy for how much more useful the previous release, Opus 4.6, has become for real-world tasks.

If the past relationship between capability measures and usefulness continues to hold, the economic impact of Mythos, once it becomes available, is going to dwarf everything that has come before, which is part of why Anthropic's decision to not release it is a serious one and actually quite a costly one for them.