📊 Anthropic just announced Claude Mythos, their most powerful AI model ever. Bigger, slower, more expensive to run than anything they've built before, and dramatically more capable. And they're not releasing it. Every AI lab for three years has followed the same playbook. Build it, ship it, let everyone use it. Anthropic broke that pattern. They've had Mythos running internally since February and decided the world isn't ready. They trained it to be really good at code. So good that it started finding security vulnerabilities on its own. A 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD, one of the most secure operating systems in the world. A 16-year-old bug in FFmpeg. It chained together multiple Linux kernel flaws to take full control of a machine. Nobody taught it to hack. It just understood software deeply enough that breaking it became a side effect. Instead of releasing it, Anthropic launched Project Glass Wing with AWS, Apple, Microsoft, Google, CrowdStrike, and others. Over $100M committed to let these teams use Mythos to patch vulnerabilities before a model like this reaches the wild. On SWE-Bench Pro, one of the hardest coding benchmarks out there, Mythos scored 78. The previous best was 53. A 50% jump on a test designed to be hard to move. One company now holds a capability advantage nobody else can touch, which is the exact situation OpenAI was originally founded to prevent. They could ship this tomorrow and make a fortune. They didn't. Either it's a marketing stunt or the risk is genuinely that serious. Looking at who signed onto Glass Wing, I think it's the second one. So what does this actually mean for the rest of us? There's a question nobody is really asking yet. Have we hit a point where the best models just don't reach the public anymore? We've gotten used to this incredible run where every few months something better drops and we all get to use it. That might be over. Not because the models stopped improving, but because they got too good. The progress keeps going but the stuff that reaches your hands flatlines. That's a weird new reality. And the pricing tells its own story. Mythos costs roughly 10x what GPT-5.4 does. $25 per million tokens in, $125 per million out. Even if they did release it, this isn't a model for normal people. This is a model for companies, governments, and security teams with serious budgets. The gap between what AI can do and what the average person has access to is about to widen fast. The big open question is whether Anthropic is actually this far ahead or if OpenAI and Google are sitting on something similar and just plan to release it. If Gemini or GPT-6 lands in the next few months with comparable capabilities and they actually ship it publicly, then this becomes a very different conversation. But if they don't, or if they also hold back, then we're looking at a new era where the most powerful AI tools exist behind closed doors and the public only gets what's been deemed safe enough. Either way, the trend we've been riding is shifting. The exponential improvement line keeps going up. The line for what you and I get to use might not. Update your phone. Update your browser. Talk to your family about AI scams. The game changed and most of us are just finding out.
ViewDAO