Three reasons to think that the Claude Mythos announcement from Anthropic was overblown
No need to panic just yet
Three reasons to think that yesterday’s Mythos announcement from Anthropic was overblown:
Where Tom Fridman worried in his Times column yesterday about kids accidentally blowing up the power grid…
… the actual system tested was given a much easier job than in real life, with “sandboxing” turned off, making it more of proof of concept than an immediate threat.
Philo Groves@PhiloGrovesMythos' Firefox exploitation didn't actually have sandbox enabled and built on top of research from Opus. Shocker.
10:57 AM · Apr 9, 2026 · 83.4K Views11 Replies · 55 Reposts · 651 LikesOpen-weight models can already do a fair amount of what Mythos can do, in a simplified preparation. Mythos is more sophisticated but perhaps not head-and-shoulders the way it was portrayed.
clem 🤗@ClementDelangue"But here is what we found when we tested: We took the specific vulnerabilities Anthropic showcases in their announcement, isolated the relevant code, and ran them through small, cheap, open-weights models. Those models recovered much of the same analysis. Eight out of eight6:58 PM · Apr 8, 2026 · 323K Views70 Replies · 233 Reposts · 1.53K LikesThe model itself is incrementally better than previous recent models, but certainly not an off-the-chart breakthrough:
Ramez Naam@ramezAnthropic's Mythos does not appear to show any acceleration of ECI. After normalizing Anthropic's internal ECI with @EpochAIResearch 's public ECI, it's clear that the two metrics are extremely close, and that Mythos is pretty much on trend, just slightly above GPT 5.4. /1
6:30 PM · Apr 8, 2026 · 132K Views28 Replies · 65 Reposts · 578 Likes
To a certain degree, I feel that we were played. The demo was definitely proof of concept that we need to get our regulatory and technical house in order, but not the immediate threat the media and public was lead to believe.
I am reminded of when strawberry (01) was rumored to be too dangerous to release by OpenAI back in 2024. Seems like this is a common trick to grab headlines and play off AI doomerism for publicity. Especially with most people feeling uncomfortable about the tech
You would think at this point someone would realize that the best way to stand out in the market is simply not to hype. At all. Just be honest. I bet it’d work.