Sam Altman weighs in on the cyber-anthropic model, Mythos: “Fear-Based Marketing”

OpenAI and Anthropic continue to take swipes at each other. This week, during an appearance on the podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked about his competitor’s new cybersecurity model, suggesting that the company was using fear to make its product seem more impressive than it actually is.

Anthropic announced Mythos earlier this month, launching the model to a small group of enterprise customers. The company claimed that Mythos was too powerful to be released to the public for fear that cybercriminals would weaponize it. Critics said this rhetoric was exaggerated.

During an appearance on the Core Memory podcast, Altman implied that Anthropic’s “fear-based marketing” was a good way to keep AI in the hands of a small, exclusive elite. “There are people in the world who have wanted for a long time to keep AI in the hands of a smaller group of people,” he said. “You can justify that in a lot of different ways.”

“It’s obviously an incredible marketing thing to say, ‘We’ve built a bomb, and we’re about to drop it on your head. We’ll sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million,'” he added.

Fear-based marketing was not invented by anthropologists. Arguably, a large portion of the AI ​​industry has made use of scare tactics and exaggeration to make its tools seem powerful. The constant rhetoric about how artificial intelligence might lead to the end of the world has not only come from destructive activists; It also came from people selling the technology to the public, including Altman.