Claim◆Audio · 15:01 — 17:37
The Mythos withholding is mostly theater — a pattern that goes back to GPT-2 in 2019 — because advanced hackers can already do this with current models like Opus, and patching all the vulnerabilities would require shutting down the internet for years.
Chamath argues the Mythos drama is a repeat of the GPT-2 scare from 2019 that amounted to nothing, pointing out that sophisticated hackers could already find these exploits with Opus and that the 100-day patching window is unrealistic given the scale of the problem. ✦ AI generated
Chamath Palihapitiya · All-In Podcast · 2026-04-10 · original ↗
plays this moment only · 15:01 — 17:37
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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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 15:01
- ·Repeat of GPT-2 (2019) — same scare pattern, same nothing burger
- ·GPT-2's 1.5B param rollout was hyped as apocalyptic, fizzled
- ·Hackers can already find these exploits using current Opus
- ·Patching would require shutting down the internet ~5 years
- ·GPT-2's staged rollout took 6–9 months, ended in nothing
- ·Internet-wide patching estimated at 5 years
- ·Short patch windows ignore the sheer scale of the problem
Around this claim
Counterpoint · 2
Anthropic deserved credit for withholding Mythos because it could have wreaked havoc by enabling offensive hacking, and the company proactively set up a defensive coalition instead of demanding government regulation.Brad Gerstner · All-In Podcast · conf 90%The Mythos security concern is real and there is a roughly six-month window for companies to patch dormant vulnerabilities before these capabilities become widely available through open-source models, which should prevent a doomsday outcome if everyone acts responsibly.David Sacks · All-In Podcast · conf 90%
This moment responds to
supports → Anthropic is on track to become the most powerful monopoly in human history, and the safety rhetoric around AI is a modern version of Rockefeller's playbook — using calls for safety regulation as a tool of regulatory capture to entrench dominance.David Sacks · All-In Podcastsupports → 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