I have seen a lot of coverage from reasonable people suggesting that Claude's new model, Mythos, is a vehicle for Anthropic to peddle hype and doom in order to raise money. While some of this is necessarily motivated by people's unwillingness to stare into the abyss of our AI future, the breadth of otherwise-reasonable people who have voiced these kinds of cynical opinions suggests that part of the blame rests on Anthropic.

In this post, I want to briefly unpack the way people misinterpreted the evidence, their valid reasons for doing so, and what Anthropic (and the AI safety community more broadly) should learn from this.

In particular, since we will inevitably see other dangerous capabilities spontaneously emerge in the future, we need protocols for how to announce them effectively. To this end, I try to make the following points:

We should be mindful of the public's sympathy for AI safety prophecies and orient ourselves towards growing this resource rather than expending it. I call this our don't-be-annoying capital.
People have good reasons to be skeptical of Anthropic's claims. Overcoming this requires a particularly high burden of evidence.
We should acknowledge that Anthropic has a conflict of interest [...]

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Outline:

(01:27) 1. Mythos criticisms & missing the point

(03:04) 2. It feels like people wanted to miss the point?

(04:19) 3. There must be a lesson here.

(05:59) 4. Some options for next time

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 26th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eSxvdX43d4rC4wAsw/anthropic-spent-too-much-don-t-be-annoying-capital-on-mythos

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“Anthropic spent too much don’t-be-annoying capital on Mythos” by draganover

LessWrong (30+ Karma)