Prediction◆Audio · 15:01 — 17:46
Anthropic's Mythos withholding is mostly theater — a clever go-to-market motion that activates hyper-attention — because any advanced hacker can already do the same things with Opus, and patching all the vulnerabilities would require shutting down the internet for years.
Chamath Palihapitiya argues that Anthropic's Mythos announcement is theater, comparing it to the GPT-2 rollout in 2019 that was also billed as apocalyptic but produced nothing. He contends that sophisticated hackers can already do this with Opus, and that the 100-day patch window is performative since fixing everything would take years. ✦ AI generated
Chamath Palihapitiya · All-In Podcast · 2026-04-10 · original ↗
plays this moment only · 15:01 — 17:46
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“Is it The Boy Who Cried Wolf, or is this the real deal now?”
I think it's mostly theater. Okay. In February of 2019, when Dario was still at OpenAI, they did the same thing with GPT-2. That was a 1.5 billion parameter model, which sounds like a total fart in the wind in 2026. But at that time, this 1.5 billion parameter model was supposed to be the end of days. And it was supposed to unleash this torrent of spam and misinformation. And that was the big bugaboo at the time. And so what happened? They went through this methodical rollout over six or nine months. They started releasing the smaller parameter models, and then they scaled up to the big 1.5 billion parameter model. And at the end of it, was a huge nothing burger. If you actually think that Mythos is capable of doing what it says it can do, two things are true. One is a very sophisticated hacker can probably do those things right now with Opus. And 2, if these exploits are this easy to find, whether you use Opus or whether you use Mythos, the reality is you'd have to shut down the internet for about 5 years to patch them all. So when you see like a large multi-trillion dollar GCIP bank, it's a bit of theater. Why? What do you think they can actually accomplish in two months? Do you actually think that if there's these vulnerabilities, it's all going to get fixed? Let's give them six months. Let's give them nine months. But the reality is that capitalism moves forward, the funding needs moves forward, and the need for these guys to build adoption moves forward. And that's going to supersede what this is. So I do think that Sachs is right that they have figured out a very clever go-to-market muscle here and a go-to-market motion that activates hyper-attention and hyper-usage.
verbatim transcript · starts at 15:01
- ·Anthropic's Mythos announcement is a go-to-market motion, not safety
- ·Sophisticated hackers can already do this with Opus
- ·Patching all exploits would require shutting down the internet for ~5 years
- ·GPT-2 (1.5B params) was billed as apocalyptic in 2019
- ·Methodical release over 6–9 months produced zero impact
- ·Mythos follows the same playbook
- ·Capitalism and adoption needs supersede safety timelines
- ·6–9 months won't fix fundamental internet vulnerabilities
- ·Clever PR activates hyper-attention and hyper-usage
Around this claim
This moment responds to
gives example → Anthropic has a proven pattern of using fear-based marketing—scare tactics around catastrophic risks—to promote new model releases, and their past warnings have failed to materialize in the real world.David Sacks · All-In Podcastsupports → Anthropic has a proven pattern of using fear-based marketing—scare tactics around catastrophic risks—to promote new model releases, and their past warnings have failed to materialize in the real world.David Sacks · All-In Podcastexplains mechanism → The asymmetry is increasingly frustrating — the frontier models we have access to are increasingly being constrained in how much they can help us protect our software, heavily influenced by the US government's ongoing threat of export controls.Simon Willison (author) · Simon Willison's Weblog