Posted by inatreecrown2 1 day ago
Because it makes their technology seem more important and powerful?
Do you usually believe 100% what a company says about itself?
> Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits
Who cares about profits? None of these companies make money like a business currently. It's all speculative valuation and influenced by the same hype/doom cycle
However, arms manufacturers are doing everything in their power to make you feel unsafe and weak and scared. That way, you are more likely to buy a gun.
This is not obvious at all. Anthropic's biggest investor was the catalyst for this action in referring the "jailbreak" (if you can even call it that) to the government. Now, Anthropic is sitting around a table with government officials who are designing benchmarks that will determine what Anthropic's competitors will be allowed to build. At this point, I have no evidence to rule out the possibility that Anthropic's leadership purposefully sought this outcome.
2 words: regulatory capture.
Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).
Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).
Now we have real companies whose valuation depends on people using their services.
> Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).
The current scale of current + planned data centres only makes sense if the US exports inference worldwide. 30% of your current total electrical generation capacity, and equivalent to 76% of your total electrical demand in 2022. At least, assuming the "33 GW installed, 300 GW more planned" claim I've heard was not itself an AI hallucination.
And at least OpenAI and Anthropic were persuing the same argumemts continuously to their initial founding, before such capture was plausible.
I don't only mean that GPT-2 was, famously, when OpenAI surprised the world with (paraphrased) "we think this is a good point to start practicing not releasing the weights, before models get too dangerous" or as a surprising number of people interpret it even when I link to OpenAI's own post "we think this is … too dangerous".
I mean even before that.
I wouldn't disagree if you say Musk is full of BS, but he did donate to OpenAI when it was created as a nonprofit, and his wealth was 2 orders of magnitude smaller than today. Back then he was talking about risks, "summoning the demon", now he's the one demanding saying "robot army" to justify a bigger compensation package from Tesla.
We must live in different planets. The whole episode about Mythos has been the absolute best free PR move ever designed. At this point everyone in tech assumes Anthropic and Mythos are the absolute best models. All of this got achieved without spending a single $$ in advertisement.
This model is also probably really dangerous, not denying that. But they definitely used it as a huge PR tool.
Great PR.
For a product nobody can pay for.
And a high chance that when anyone can, the market shrinks from "worldwide internet users" to "the USA only".
And it's known to be a highly dynamic market: based on the historical average, it only takes 11 weeks to be completely trounced by someone else's model, so if you're out of the market that long you may as well not have bothered.
Still don't see it? Still don't see how the huge IPO coming up soon could profit from this?
Yes, this was a brilliant PR move (independent from the actual benefit of the model).
"Would you like to buy Anthropic shares?"
"Anthropic? Didn't the government ban them?"
"Yes"
"I'll pass"
I remember then Thefacebook.com was only available at certain universities and everyone felt slight envy that they weren't included. Didn't work out too bad for them.
The only examples of companies voluntarily putting up warnings I can think of are those obviously tongue-in-cheek warnings "this book/game/series may cause addiction because it's just so good" etc.
1. Those, like OP, that believe AI danger and disruption is all hype to boost valuations.
2. Those, like myself, that believe AI danger and disruption is very real and presents dilemmas (but also opportunities) for society, so we must tread carefully.
The first position is not logically consistent with reality. The danger is real: we have already seen hints about how this will impact everything from jobs to warfare to mental health. that danger does not increase valuation, in fact it does the opposite because of the need for government regulation.
For frontier leaders, regulation is a competitive moat. At trillion dollar scale, compliance teams, legal and lobbyists are a tiny fraction of opex. For emerging startups, early regulation of a new market is a substantial barrier to entry.
That said, I think Anthropic blundered into their current Fable mess unintentionally by underestimating just how much they pissed off the current administration by refusing to let the DoD use Ant's AI's for all the domestic spying and lethal combat ops they want.
But that belief does not imply the doom rhetoric is necessary or the best way to approach those issues.
> It’s all just nonsensical hype
And he’s referring to completely real and reasonable warnings in anthropic blog posts about the exponential rate of AI development.
The METR task-completion time horizons, for one.
Make your own then. It can go on the pile with all the others that keep getting saturated too fast to be useful.
> they explicitly focus on the easiest tasks to automate for AI (i.e. heavily cherry picked outcomes) and it seems that they don't bother to test anything except just-released proprietary models.
What?
They made the benchmark last year, and included a bunch of models going back as far as 2019.
When they first announced it, the top end of their tests were things AI could not actually automate, and even now only does erratically. Examples of the tasks SOTA models are now saturating (at the 50% success level, not at 80%) include:
"Prune attention heads of a BERT language model while minimizing accuracy loss on text classification tasks."
"Implement a Python library for the ACE-OAuth standard that can generate and parse messages in CBOR format and encrypt/decrypt access tokens with COSE according to RFC specifications."
"Debug a PyTorch machine learning library with gradient calculation and memory optimization bugs until all tests pass."
"Finetune a large language model to reduce the accuracy of a truth detection probe while maintaining performance on standard benchmarks."
- https://arxiv.org/html/2503.17354v1
It's about ego, not profits.
The whole point of the article is to answer this question, and here's the answer:
Because all the AI doom fear-mongering is driving sky-high valuations. The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.
Hype up the *positives*.
Even here on HN, Tesla fans try to justify the market cap by pointing at Optimus, even though nobody can buy it and there's already competition for it which you can buy.
SpaceX announced a private flight around the moon in 2017 to launch in 2018, but instead in February 2018 SpaceX cancelled the certification of vehicle it was supposed to use and said they were switching to BFR. In September 2018, that became dearMoon and was due to fly there in 2023. Starship did actually launch in 2023, but exploded twice, and dearMoon was cancelled by the customer in 2024. Starship still isn't getting its test orbits circularised, because SpaceX doesn't trust the engines will relight correctly. What's in the IPO docs, to justify the price? Space based data centres that only make any sense (and even then barely) with cheap rockets that don't work right yet.
Can say the same for self-driving, or Optimus, or TBC, or Neuralink, or Cybertruck, or X, or Grok (where the closest he gets to "doom" these days seems to be how he considers "woke" a dirty word). And in the past even how many cars Tesla expected to sell vs. what they actually sold, which is a demonstration of how shifting goalposts, and not just missing them, still fails to undermine hype.
It's all "jam tomorrow" with him, even though when tomorrow comes there's still no jam; and yet, how many trillion in market cap?
> The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.
I don't believe this to be causation, but I can see the correlation.
Because Americans are obsessed with eschatological narratives and action hero stories. I talked to a Palantir guy once who told me that he loves it when journalists describe his company as a James Bond villain because every single time the market cap goes up.
If they said that they're SAP with Call of Duty marketing they'd actually lose money. In other countries this strategy might not check out but in the US it's better to pretend to be a supervillain than to be boring
Well, that explains Musk.
That's a bit like asking, "why would someone claim to have a lot of money if they didn't?" It's step 1 in countless scams.
You can't think of any ways to exploit people by convincing them you have technology which might rule the world soon?
Whether or not that level of power exists, that is definitely how they're pitching it.
People just love to talk about anything that tickling their fancies.
It’s all a fugazi.
I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.
Another thing that is commonly remembered but did not really happen as described. If you had to identify any particular bank as having caused the crisis, it would have to be Lehman Brothers, which was not bailed out. But really, it was a systemic crisis to which TARP was deployed as a systemic solution. Much of the "bailout" talk is based on memories of AIG, which is not a bank and behaved far more irresponsibly than any bank did; they seem not to have bothered hedging their exposure to widespread mortgage defaults at all.
> I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.
This did happen, yes, and that was bad.
Also why do you think the Mythos thing is bad for profits? Anthropic hyped the model up too hard and didn't even have the compute to serve it properly to all users.
The export control issue has not affected Anthropic's revenue and only made its top of the line products seem far more impressive than they actually are. People don't think Nvidia is a bad company if the government puts export controls on their products.
For Anthropic, valuation and public perception is 100x more important before the IPO than revenue or profitablity.
Weird to think profits matter half as much as ever-increasing valuations, driven by memetic bullshit. E.g. the entire point of the article you're commenting on.
If the company really think their product is dangerous, they should stop making it increasingly dangerous. Antromorphic claims is dangerous and that they need more money to make it even more dangerous.
And the fearmongering is beneficial for them so far.
It helps to look at the history of the AI Alarmist, EA-adjacent mindset. They believe AI could be Dangerous (<--- capital D) if not responsibly managed by the right people (spoiler: themselves or politicians who listen to them). The capital D means more than just some economic and employment disruption, they're thinking much bigger, like "existential threat to humanity" big.
The most extreme alarmists are basically LARPing Terminator 2 and want to shut it down before SkyNet takes over but the more moderate alarmists believe AI is too potentially beneficial to walk away from. And they acknowledge other nations and various bad actors won't stop anyway, so they believe it's their sacred duty to move forward quickly albeit very responsibly. Yes, this leads to some conflicted reasoning and priorities, like they need to keep gaining access to gobs of capital to ensure they are the ones to reach AGI first, as that's the only way to ensure "god" is benevolent.
While I'm sure many of the top AI leadership are primarily (or purely) mercenary, I also think some, if not many, other execs and employees sincerely believe (or at least hope) they are "the good guys" playing a crucial role in an era of historical importance. Obviously, this has some heavy vibes as well as a being quite a buff to one's self-importance. They face each new day feeling the weight of bearing such a consequential role in shaping the future of humanity. Us mere mortals can only pray their wisdom and altruistic ethics match their humility. </s>
So... yeah, that's why we see some weirdly whiplash messaging.
The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.
Just to throw out a random example - could technology, in terms of advances and improvements to allocation, distribution, and consumption, play a part in solving the western US's water issues? Probably. But would it be something that make a trillion dollars and a household name? Maybe not. And could saner policy, like making farmers have to bid for acre feet instead of getting it for basically free + distribution cost also help? Sure.
Likewise, even with AI most software is still crap. Like when have you heard about a doctor who loves their EHR? Like never.
So I think technology could be a solver of at least a lot more things. But we've created a market where people want to exhaust every flavor of flim flam and trend of the moment first. Because we've glorified the business of tech more than the actual improvements and aspirations that should be possible.
AI is not that bad
Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.
If true, it will only be replaced with something else. With what is anyone’s guess.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...
Specifically Anthropic's whole PR has all been about danger, safety, doomerism all to make themselves indirectly more important and central to the debate.
Calling meetings in Washington DC in order to let everyone know they made a cyberweapon is part of those PR moves. Then they seem surprised lawmakers actually called them out and asked to stop serving that model.
I know this is the cynical take but I cannot unsee the elephant in the room: This doomerism allowed Anthropic to be the center of every AI conversation right now. Their market cap and upcoming IPO is indirectly benefiting from this.
I also cannot take that Anthropic while letting everyone know that Doom is coming (or is already here), are also the ones that want to decide who can profit from this Doomerism. This is how every benevolent dictators start.
I don’t think “benevolent” is necessary in that sentence. It’s how many non-benevolent dictatorships started.
Every dictator is benevolent for the people that agree with them.
doing what though? in a really literal sense, if an LLM can do RLVR, that's optimization over the space of algorithms, and so anything with a measurable goal at the end can be incentivized. if it can be measurably finished, it can be automated.
there are exceptions to this, like psychology, preschool teachers, and AI safety, that cant be 100% fully automated. in the case of Ai safety, the core motivation for it is to prevent the otherwise hyper-consequentialist goal-orented training algorithms (and mesa-optimizers they now find) from doing 'bad' things by instilling some 'values' into these machines. the ideas of 'good/bad' and 'values' cant be automated away, and I think you can prove that its unautomatable using EY's orthogonality thesis.
I doubt these few unautomatable jobs can keep everyone afloat though. but maybe a world in which 10% of the population has a degree in psychology wouldn't be that bad
Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.
Of course it impacts company valuation.
I don't see why pondering the future and planning for eventualities is bad. Better to ignore it and have no plans?
So, yeah, if that is real concern, they should not ignore it, but should stop themselves for real.
In addition, if you look at the graph of LOC written by Claude vs Ants (I.e. AI vs human), there is an incredibly sharp uptick post-Mythos internal preview. Something like from 30% to 75% of code inside the company being written by AI.
While I sympathize with the viewpoint here, I still have to admit that that there's a very different feeling to working inside of a company where they've had months of time with a model that's at the frontier, quickly changing the way everyone around them works, and that _they themselves_ control the keys to.
If Geohot had those keys, I can be 100% confident he'd be raising the alarm at the top of his lungs about it.
Seriously -- if you dig through that source code, and then listen to the messaging, it seems hard to keep a straight face.
Also, hasn't this company been claiming that almost all their code is written with AI for significantly longer than "post-Mythos internal preview"?
It’s because Anthropic doesn’t publish any of its core AI research that we falsely believe that it isn’t by far the central focus of the majority of the team.
Just to be clear, I’m not supporting their stance nor defending the company. I consider it to be deeply harmful that a private company seeks to advocate for AI safety but then own all the means of production and profit financially from keeping its techniques secret. It’s as if the Manhattan project resulted in a for-profit company selling all atomic technology and deciding on its use.