(Preview) Mythos and Project Glasswing, The Year of Anthropic Continues Apace, Q&A on the NYT, Altman, De-globalization

Ben and Andrew begin with reactions to Anthropic’s Mythos announcement and Project Glasswing, including thoughts on the security risks, the business benefits of keeping this model private, lessons on the “Boy Who Cried Wolf,” and renewed focus on Anthropic’s relationship with the U. S. government. From there: Anthropic’s new deal with Broadcom and Google, a year of stunning Anthropic success that began in 2024, the threats that Anthropic poses to Microsoft, and where AI can and can’t help with taxes. At the end: How the New York Times is adapting to the future, understanding Sam Altman’s history at OpenAI, and a question on the implications of de-globalization.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

• 0:19Ben Thompson?

  I mean, you know, I'm working through, working through the five stages of grief.

• 0:25Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 0:26Ben Thompson?

  What are those stages again? I was never mad.

• 0:29Andrew Sharp?

  Bartending is one of them. Acceptance is the final stage. Denial is definitely one of the stages as well.

• 0:36Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, well, you and I, we are together in the permanent underclass.

• 0:43Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, boy.

• 0:43Ben Thompson?

  We do not have access to Mythos. We are.

• 0:47Andrew Sharp?

  Not part of class wing here at Stratechery, unfortunately.

• 0:51Ben Thompson?

  Down on the bottom, just mucking along as good as we can, making some podcasts. So it is what it is.

• 0:57Andrew Sharp?

  Just speculating from the outside. That's all we can do today, but that is what we will do. I'll begin with the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:04Ben Thompson?

  By the way, I use the exact same opening on Dithering. Maybe I need more. Maybe that's why I'm in the permanent.

• 1:11Andrew Sharp?

  Cross-platform promotion. That's two weeks in a row now. I love to see it.

• 1:15Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, that's good. I'm kind of feeling self chastised. I need to get some new material.

• 1:21Andrew Sharp?

  It's self chastised, so at least you're consistent with your mispronunciation. The brand remains strong here and we will begin with the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic is taking steps to arm some of the world's biggest technology companies with tools to find and patch bugs in their hardware and software. The company is making a preview model of its new AI model called Mythos, available to about 50 companies and organizations that maintain critical infrastructure, including Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet-owned Google and the Linux Foundation. Mythos has proved to be so capable of potentially dangerous things, such as finding and exploiting software bugs,

• 2:04Andrew Sharp?

  that Anthropic has at present no plans to release it to the general public, said Logan Graham, the head. Head of Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, which evaluates Claude for risks. So Ben, generally speaking, I'll let you take it any direction you want. You wrote about Anthropic on both Tuesday and Wednesday. And this mythos model, reading about it was pretty unsettling earlier in the week. But what do you think of what's happening here?

• 2:30Ben Thompson?

  Why is it unsettling? We just discussed it on Sharp Tech a week ago.

• 2:33Andrew Sharp?

  Well, we exactly what we discussed and the threats to security that we discuss now appear to be imminent, albeit private for the time being.

• 2:43Ben Thompson?

  Maybe that's why we're maybe that's why we're already. Yeah, maybe that's why we're already at stage five. No, I think a very timely discussion we had last week about the reality that, I mean, it's interesting. This actually ties into a long running discussion that we've had, particularly this year, about the uniqueness of programming and code and its suitability for large language models. And the fact that, you know, how do you program? You put a bunch of words and symbols together in sort of arcane ways that it can be difficult for a lot of humans to sort of do. But human computers quite good at it.

• 3:25Ben Thompson?

  Particularly large language models can handle large amounts of language, which at the end of the day, all of software is just massive amounts of language. And again, that language may not be very understandable to you or I, but it is very predictable and understandable. And to that end, given what we've talked about, this should not be a surprise to, to us or to our listeners. So yeah, here we are now. How here are we?

• 3:55Ben Thompson?

  This is, it's, it's hard to say, right? Because this is Anthropic. These are the same people who going, it's funny, be like, oh, OpenAI did this too. No, the Anthropic people did this at OpenAI. Where they're like, you know, like, why is OpenAI not open? Because GPT-2 posed too many dangers to the world. So it's like, yeah, we're not going to be, be, be open anymore. And just so happens that not being open is actually good for business. You think back to the don't. So let me back up. No one get mad at me until I we finish this whole segment. Okay. Cause we're gonna cover lots of different areas. I already see our first email is someone that's very mad at me.

• 4:37Ben Thompson?

  So Mr. Anonymous, relax. So we're gonna get there. Okay. Uh, you go back to 2019. Uh, I think it was 2019 when GPT two came out. And there's a, this is dangerous. And there's also a, maybe it's not the best thing in the world. If we're on the weeding edge to give everyone our weights. Uh, because then they can just run the bottle themselves. Right? The equivalent here, and by the way, I think another area where we were very early. What was one of the points that we brought up with DeepSeek a year and a half ago? Well, DeepSeek looks like it's kind of distilled from leading US models. And everyone just sort of takes it as a given.

• 5:20Ben Thompson?

  Or they hold it up as an excuse when these labs are complaining about distillation, which we've talked about this idea that you basically query the API a gazillion times for all sorts of things and you get your own data from the model to train your own model. Like, how do like, how do you get these, oh, OpenAI is or open source is only six months behind? Well, because it's about six months that it takes to query the models.

• 5:43Andrew Sharp?

  Successfully distill them. Well, can I ask one question on that? Because this came up on Sharp China and it's come up a couple of different times on Sharp China. And I don't have a good answer. And as a tech podcaster, I feel like I'm failing Bill Bishop in the course of these conversations. Is there?

• 6:00Ben Thompson?

  I mean, what a tough gig for you. You, you have to be the, the dumb normie on this podcast that you have to be.

• 6:05Andrew Sharp?

  I know.

• 6:06Ben Thompson?

  Brilliant tech understander on that.

• 6:08Andrew Sharp?

  Wearing many hats. But is there a way to reliably prevent distillation in the future? Because distilling a model that's as powerful as Mythos seems like it could be a problem going forward.

• 6:20Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, a sealed model is never going to be quite as good as the regular one. And it's much more jagged, there's much more holes, um, you know, much more, much less comprehensive. So just in general, it's a bit where they're always going to be behind to a certain extent. But that doesn't change the fact that if they're more than good enough and these leading edge models are very expensive. It's a great alternative if you, you know, want something else. So maybe just to go back to this story, there's a very good business reason for not making this available. Just like there is a good reason for not making open weights available. This is like, it's the same story.

• 7:00Ben Thompson?

  And if you think about the, these companies wanting to have market power slash pricing power in the long run. Well, making sure there's not nearly as good models to the extent you can is a way to do that. And the challenge is if you have a self-serve walk-up API that anyone can use. Yeah, it's pretty hard, it's pretty hard to stop. Like, I mean, we've all pirated music, it's not like the same story. Other than to say like trying to stop people doing stuff on the internet when there's open APIs and things that you can access is a tough game.

• 7:34Andrew Sharp?

  Effectively impossible, you can make it harder, but not impossible.

• 7:38Ben Thompson?

  Right, and, and you know, it's one of those things you often find it after it's happened. Like, uh, you go through your logs and say, wow, we're getting hit on this endpoint from this set of IP addresses a gazillion times, which have been routed through a gazillion points and they're, you know, it's not like they're coming from like the Forbidden City IP range and like accessing the model, like they're spinning up cloud servers on Digital Ocean or on AWS or whatever. And like doing this, probably AWS, probably too expensive, but like there's a, um, it's not, yeah, it's not easy. But basically, just like, it is a rough analogy, like policing chips is a lot harder than like policing uranium, for example, right?

• 8:21Andrew Sharp?

  You can see from satellites and it's much easier.

• 8:23Ben Thompson?

  There's a bit where like, if someone like breaks into like OpenAI and exfiltrates the weights, you know, very clear. Thievery going on. If you're going on and just sort of asking a bunch of questions at a very high rate of speed, which computers are very good at, it's a lot tougher to stop. So yeah, so you have this sort of business issue. You also have, Anthropic can barely stay online right now, right? Like there, you know, the people, it is this massive upsurge in revenue, in users. They're doing this weird rationing thing, like these five hour blocks, which aren't really five hours. Cause like the five hours is shorter than five hours during certain times of day and then it's longer at other times.

• 9:03Ben Thompson?

  Like, and then people are complaining about, oh, they're purposely reducing the model quality. There's definitely like, they're serving distilled models themselves and you could distill much more effectively. If you, if it's your model and you have like full access to it instead of just using the API. And they're quantizing, but also they're doing lots of things like trying to leverage cash and doing sort of like, trying to batch a bunch of stuff together and all these optimizations sort of layer on each other to really diminish the experience. To the extent that it's very hard to separate, is it on purpose? I don't think it's on purpose, but it's inevitable as you're trying to sort of scale up this compute and even then they can barely stay online, right? Like, uh, and so you, so you have this new model comes out that is extremely computationally

• 9:49Ben Thompson?

  expensive and intense. Uh, and you just look at the API pricing, which is like five X what Opus is. And by the way, Opus is significantly more expensive than say GPT five point four, which is an even smaller model. Um, and so if we could limit it not to the hoi polloi, but to people who will actually pay us real money. Also a good sort of business justification, right? They'd write, you know, uh, and so.

• 10:13Andrew Sharp?

  All of this is making me feel much better as we read about a potentially existentially dangerous model here.

• 10:21Ben Thompson?

  Right, but.

• 10:21Andrew Sharp?

  There are lots of rational reasons to approach it this way.

• 10:24Ben Thompson?

  The danger is totally plausible. And if, and even if the danger, this is why I told everyone to hold off. The people who want to be mad at me, even if it's possible they're overstating it right now. It doesn't mean they're overstating the reality in six months or nine months or a year. The fact of the matter is, we are going to have a crisis of thousands, not thousands, millions, billions of lines of code that have been built by humans from the beginning of the computing era till now, which unquestionably contained tons and tons of bugs because that is just the reality of software. And theoretically, you could have tons and tons and millions of humans go over them and find them all,

• 11:09Ben Thompson?

  but that's not practical. And what are computers really good at? Doing boring, sort of line by line, yeoman's work and going over and working through everything. And the larger these models get and the more capable they get and the larger context they have and the more like, yes, this is going to happen. So if it's not happening now, it might be happening now. It will be happening in the future. So it's almost pointless to speculate. I'll give anthropic more grace here, basically. I will, I consistently criticize them for overstating things where they're at right now. And it's a very much a boy, but, but this is why I brought the boy cried wolf analogy.

• 11:52Ben Thompson?

  People talk about the boy crying wolf and they only talk about the first 80% of the story where the boy keeps crying wolf.

• 11:58Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Ben Thompson?

  At the end of the story, the wolf does come, right?

• 12:01Andrew Sharp?

  You know what? I actually, I was not familiar. I mean, I've obviously familiar with the fable there, but I didn't know that the wolf does come at the end of the boy cried wolf fable until reading Stratechery earlier in the week there. So.

• 12:15Ben Thompson?

  What? How is this possible?

• 12:17Andrew Sharp?

  I mean, it's been what? Probably 35 years since I read that story. So over time, I'm familiar with the cliche and not necessarily the original text undergirding the cliche.

• 12:30Ben Thompson?

  Oh, well, the great thing is all of those fables, like the real versions are all very like dark.

• 12:35Andrew Sharp?

  Dark.

• 12:35Ben Thompson?

  And well, arguably something we've forgotten, right? The point of them was to instill healthy fear and instincts into children, right? Like.

• 12:48Ben Thompson?

  You know, there's, there's been a real movement to soften all these things and make them more complex and uh.

• 12:54Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, believe me, I'm reading children's books every single night and nobody ever dies. Nothing bad ever happens. Whereas my wife grew up with her mom reading her like German fables.

• 13:05Ben Thompson?

  That's right. The original German ones.

• 13:07Andrew Sharp?

  Really grisly. Um, so, uh, perhaps we're at a better place on that front or perhaps not. Perhaps children needed those lessons from Germans way back when.

• 13:16Ben Thompson?

  That's, that might be the case.

• 13:18Andrew Sharp?

  Well, you teased this email. I'll read it from anonymous. He says, I was annoyed by Ben's daily update today about Mythos. Yes, there are lots of reasons to be cynical of Anthropic. I myself have very large concerns about them, both about their actual plans and their motivations, along with all the other leading AI companies. But I wish that for at least some of that update on Mythos, he could have put his cynicism to the side and talked about what he thinks a company should do if they have the capability Anthropic claims Mythos has. There are leading security researchers saying they've found more security vulnerabilities with Mythos

• 13:58Andrew Sharp?

  in the last month or two than they found in their entire careers. That sounds like it could be a pretty big deal. I'd love to hear Ben's thoughts if he takes the capabilities at face value, regardless of which company develops them, instead of just using it as an opportunity for another round of reasons to be cynical about Anthropic, Dario and their motivations. So if these capabilities exist, what should a company do? What's the optimal course of action?

• 14:27Ben Thompson?

  So there's a great concept on Greatest of All Talk, um, that you guys really lay into some emailers who are like begging for like generic praise. They're like, you know, I.

• 14:40Andrew Sharp?

  Appreciate my team. Appreciate my favorite player. Yes. There's a whole genre of email.

• 14:44Ben Thompson?

  A little bit like a generic praise request here. In my update, I listed the reasons to be cynical and said. I made the wolf analogy, which is the wolf is going to come at some point like so I think I gave it credence and even if it's not real right now, it's going to be real. So I think anonymous is a little bit, you know, he's got me painted as the anti-anthropic guy, which is probably fairly fair to like it's up but by my anthropic bit is rooted in deep respect and appreciation for the company and like so that's like it's only a reason to be worried about them to the extent

• 15:28Ben Thompson?

  that they're like legitimate and have their shit together in a major way. And I think that's been my my sort of point all along. So yeah, so the and in that if you want to frame this very narrowly, um, and this actually came up, I don't know if I mentioned on the podcast, but when the quad code source code leaked, there was a bit in there about hiding mode, like anonymous mode, where you know, report issues, but don't say who you are. And that seems like that was probably what we're seeing now, where that was for Mythos to go out, don't show that it's Mythos finding this, but start reporting all these bugs. And I brought up that example.

• 16:05Andrew Sharp?

  Reporting them to what? To companies?

• 16:07Ben Thompson?

  Well, I brought that example for like, uh, there was a discussion in the Linux, one of the, uh, I think it was the, the, the um, kernel group about we're getting a bunch more bug reports.

• 16:18Andrew Sharp?

  Unbelievable amounts of bugs and they're all real bugs.

• 16:20Ben Thompson?

  They're all real bugs, right? It's so like, uh, and you know, how much of that was actually anthropic acting? I absolutely think it is. It is. It's a really interesting question that you look at this narrowly. Yeah, this is good, right? It like, let's get out there and fix as many of these bugs as possible before bad actors get a hold of this and figure out all these exploits. So I will grant this to anonymous, and I think that's a fair point. The, the challenge, the issue that in what I was going for in the last section of the update is

• 16:57Ben Thompson?

  This very much ties into the ongoing anthropic discussion we've had, which is to the extent you do take them seriously, it's just validating all of the points, questions, concerns that came up in the dispute with the Department of, whatever you want to call it, Defense slash War. Very annoying that this is a political point.

• 17:21Andrew Sharp?

  A loaded topic, a loaded distinction there. Well, yeah, I mean, that's reading about it. Any normal person would think, why should a private company have all this power? Like, what's the argument that the technology shouldn't be nationalized? Is, I think, a natural follow up to.

• 17:39Ben Thompson?

  Because nationalizing stuff is terrible, right?

• 17:41Andrew Sharp?

  Well, no, I know, but I think a lot of people will read a blog post from Anthropic and be like, holy crap, it can do all of this? And obviously, like, the CCP's involvement with DeepSeek seems to have junked up their operation a good bit. So I have full faith that the government would screw up Anthropic if it were nationalized. But at the same time, like, having the ability to hack into every company and every government on Earth seems like a pretty dangerous power to vest in a group of private individuals.

• 18:11Ben Thompson?

  Right, well, this is the interesting thing to think about, right? So it's funny to see, you know, after we got, you know, or we, and my mouth's in my pocket, I got sort of like fairly attacked for making the argument in the context of that dispute between the US government and Anthropic. My argument there was, the problem is, it's not a question of like laws. It's that the people who have the guns, if are, they're fundamentally threatened, are going to ignore the law because the law is downstream from that, right? Like, the extreme version of sort of a real politic argument, and not just in the context of international relations, in the context of like, who's actually in charge of day to day life?

• 18:53Ben Thompson?

  Ultimately, where do, you know, where does the laws come from? If you're willing to come from the other barrel of a gun, if someone else is developing a better gun than you, the. It's entering into a fraught situation in the intervening period before you have full power for the other entity to say, I'm gonna take that for myself. You're not gonna be able to develop this power. But what's interesting is, so you saw a few more people, I think Derek Thompson was one, it's sort of like the, the center, center left is now starting to like, say, ah, there might be a little bit of a concern here and saying like,

• 19:28Andrew Sharp?

  Or at least inevitable tension that needs to be resolved somehow.

• 19:31Ben Thompson?

  But their tension they're coming up with is, well, wait, Anthropic could like hack the US government? Like, we're depending on their good grace not to do that? Well, that's one angle. Another angle is you could imagine the US government looking at this capability and saying, not just worried about us being hacked, but actually, we would like to be able to go hack China, right? Like, we would be able to have this capability for ourselves. And so, and it sounds, it's funny, because on one hand, you can sit here and make fun of Anthropic for being scaremongers and Chicken Little's about everything and GPT-2. You could

• 20:13Ben Thompson?

  turn that same criticism on me, right? Where I'm like scaremongering about the US government viewing it as, as an opponent, or someone that needs to be sort of brought to heel, as it were. And everyone is sort of looking into theoreticals and seeing what might happen down the road. So, in that regard, I have appreciation and sympathy for their position as well. But this, it's, I feel like it's starting to, this is the tension in this announcement. To the extent you do take them seriously, sure, good job, we're glad you're out there

• 20:52Ben Thompson?

  patching bugs. That is a good thing to happen. But you are just inviting and accentuating this fundamental tension that has not yet been resolved from a month ago.

• 21:06Andrew Sharp?

  All right, and that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at [email protected].