Sam Altman accuses Anthropic of using "Fear Marketing" to promote the Claude Mythos

BlockBeats News, April 23rd - According to Decrypt, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pushed back against recent warnings about competitor Anthropic's powerful new model, Claude Mythos, implying that the company is using "fear marketing" to promote the product. Altman, speaking on the Core Memory podcast hosted by tech journalist Ashlee Vance, stated, "Fear-based marketing is intended to keep AI in the hands of 'a small set of people'." He said, "There are many ways you can defend this, some of which are genuine, like there are reasonable security concerns indeed. But if what you want is 'we need to control AI and only we can because we are the trustworthy ones,' fear marketing might be the most effective defense."

Altman further noted that while concerns about AI safety are valid, he described this marketing approach as, "We've built a bomb, it's about to drop on your head, we can sell you a $100 million blast shelter, you need it to protect all your stuff, but the catch is we have to select you as a customer." He pointed out that balancing AI's new capabilities with OpenAI's belief that "technology should be broadly accessible" is "not an easy thing."

Anthropic's Claude Mythos model, released last month, has garnered significant attention from researchers, governments, and the cybersecurity industry for its ability to autonomously identify software vulnerabilities and carry out complex network operations during testing. The model is currently only available to a select few institutions such as Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft through the Project Glasswing restricted program. Earlier this month, the model uncovered hundreds of vulnerabilities in Mozilla's Firefox browser during testing. Altman also stated, "There will be more and more talk about models that are 'too dangerous to be released,' but there will also be some very dangerous models that have to be released in different ways. I believe Mythos is an excellent cybersecurity model, but we have our own fairly satisfying plan on how to bring such capabilities into the world."