CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Putting the Calamity Makers in Charge: Anthropic and Claude Mythos Preview

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Photograph Source: TechCrunch – CC BY 2.0

Be wary of a company – any company – who exerts moral muscle as they create software and digital platforms that are injurious and simultaneously lauded for curing that injury.  Be especially wary of Anthropic.  With sagacious loftiness, it warns of the disabling dangers of the artificial intelligence (AI) frontier.  Principled, it tells the Trump administration it will not partake in creating AI software that aids mass surveillance, a move that earned it an order of excommunication as a “supply chain risk”.  It then goes on to create Claude Mythos Preview, a seemingly dystopian model that will, according to certain computer scientists “scan the hidden plumbing of the internet – operating systems, browsers, routers, and shared open-source code – at an unprecedented scale” thereby turning specialised hacking into “a routine and automated process.”

The new Claude Mythos Preview was advertised with almost parental glee as the “best-aligned model that we have released to date by a significant margin”.  The child, however, seemed to be a horror, a true cyber shit.  The AI model was “likely to possess the greatest alignment-related risk of any model we have released to date.”  This two-ways lingo is typical of Anthropic: safety is a cardinal virtue to be treasured but that hardly excuses not developing a model of terrifying danger.  They manufacture the danger and the cure.

The danger lies in the company’s assertion that Mythos Preview revealed that “AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled........

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