Claude Mythos and misguided open-weight fearmongering

Another dance around fears of open-source.

This post originally appeared in Interconnects.

“Tools like Mythos will make the best attackers have more powerful tools of the trade, but it won’t be handing a nuke to every teenager connected to the internet.”

With the announcement of the Claude Mythos model this week and the admittedly very strong stated abilities, especially in cybersecurity, a new wave of anti open-weight AI model narratives surged. The TL;DR of the argument is that our digital infrastructure will not be ready in time for an open-weight version of this model, which will allow attacks to be conducted by numerous parties.

The backlash against open models in the wake of the Mythos news conflates too many general unknowns into a simple, broad policy recommendation that could actually further weaken cybersecurity readiness.