Anthropic has a new product with a major catch—it’s too powerful to be released.
For a company valued at around $380 billion and reportedly preparing for an IPO this year, it’s an unusual stance—but one that could pay off in the long run.
But what does all of this mean for Anthropic’s standing in the AI race and its rumored upcoming IPO? A few things.
As well as being a responsible safety initiative, Project Glasswing is also just pretty great brand-building, according to Paulo Shakarian, a Professor of artificial intelligence at Syracuse University.
By creating a tightly controlled consortium and working directly with industry partners, Anthropic is “taking a lead in the industry as to mitigating these new risks,” he told Fortune. It’s an approach that Shakarian says “plays really well with the chief security officers of the world.” In a field that relies on regularly sharing threat intelligence, that kind of collaboration is likely to win Anthropic some favor and could strengthen the company’s standing with enterprise customers.
But Mythos’ new and improved capabilities also come at a cost. According to Richard Whaling, lead researcher of cybersecurity startup Charlemagne Labs, Anthropic may have more than just safety concerns on its mind when it comes to the powerful AI model.
“I share Anthropic’s concerns around Mythos’ potential misuse, but I think there is also a resource limitation at play,” he said. “Anthropic has not announced how large Mythos is, but has implied that it is many times larger—and more expensive—than Claude Opus. I think it is likely that they simply do not have the GPU and other compute resources available to serve it at scale.”
In other words: Anthropic may have built something both too dangerous and potentially too expensive to commercialize at scale in its current state.
See you next week,
