LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

This post assumes Anthropic isn't lying:

Mythos is the current SOTA
Mythos is potent[1]
Anthropic will not make it publicly available un-nerfed[2]
Anthropic will have a select few companies use it as part of project glasswing[3] to improve cybersecurity or whatever
Since the release of ChatGPT, at any given time, anyone on the planet with a few bucks could access the current most capable AI model, the SOTA.[4]

Since Mythos, this has no longer been the case and I don't think it will ever happen again.

It may happen for a short period of time if an entity with a policy differing significantly from Anthropic develops a SOTA model.[5] However, most serious competitors (OpenAI, Google), don't have policies differing vastly from Anthropic, and thus I can't imagine a SOTA model (more potent than Mythos) being released unrestricted to the public soon.

To be clear, I am not claiming the public will never have access to a model as strong as Mythos, this seems almost certainly false, I am claiming that the public will probably never have access to the SOTA of that time.

Glasswing makes it clear that the attitude among top large companies - those in power [...]

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

April 12th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3MhJELzwpbR42xsJ3/the-policy-surrounding-mythos-marks-an-irreversible-power

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

There's a quote I read as a kid that stuck with me my whole life:

"Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot."
-- P. J. O'Rourke.

At first I took away the libertarian lesson: Government is violence. It may, in some cases, be rightful violence. But it all rests on violence; never forget that.

Today I do think there's an important distinction between two different shapes of violence. It's a distinction that may make my fellow old-school classical Heinlein liberaltarians roll up their eyes about how there's no deep moral difference. I still hold it to be important.

In a high-functioning ideal state -- not all actual countries -- the state's violence is predictable and avoidable, and meant to be predicted and avoided. As part of that predictability, it comes from a limited number of specially licensed sources.

You're supposed to know that you can just pay your taxes, and then not get shot.

Is [...]

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First published:

April 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-can-prevent-extinction

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

99% do you start sawing off your own leg" that's not how this works bro.". Eliezer Yudkowsky replies with an image showing a blue and purple cartoon dinosaur screaming with text reading "AAAAA" and "AAAA" on a brown background." style="max-width: 100%;" />

Epistemic status: I think this is true but don't think this post is a very strong argument for the case, or particularly interesting to read. But I had to get 500 words out! I think the 2013 conversation is interesting reading as a piece of history, separate from the top-level question, and recommend reading that.

I think many people have a relationship with Anthropic that is premised on a false belief: that Dario Amodei believes in superintelligence.

What do I mean by "believes" in superintelligence? Roughly speaking, that the returns to intelligence past the human level are large, in terms of the additional affordances they would grant for steering the world, and that it is practical to get that additional intelligence into a system.

There are many pieces of evidence which suggest this, going quite far back.

In 2013, Dario was one of two science advisors (along with Jacob Steinhardt) that Holden brought along to a discussion with Eliezer and Luke about MIRI strategy. A transcript of the conversation is here. It is the first piece of public communication I can find from Dario on the subject. Read end-to-end, I don't think it strongly supports my titular claim. However [...]

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First published:

April 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fnty2JpQ6WBD9FWo5/dario-probably-doesn-t-believe-in-superintelligence

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses.

A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried me so I asked around some more. Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not.

One mother strongly advised me never to send my baby to daycare. She regretted sending her (normal and healthy) first son to daycare when he was one—he ended up hospitalized with severe pneumonia after a few months of constant illnesses and infections. She told me that after that she didn’t send her other kids to daycare and they had much healthier childhoods.

I also started paying more attention to the kids I [...]

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First published:

April 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/byiLDrbj8MNzoHZkL/daycare-illnesses

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Anthropic's system card for Mythos Preview says:

It's unclear how we should interpret this. What do they mean by productivity uplift? To what extent is Anthropic's institutional view that the uplift is 4x? (Like, what do they mean by "We take this seriously and it is consistent with our own internal experience of the model.")

One straightforward interpretation is: AI systems improve the productivity of Anthropic so much that Anthropic would be indifferent between the current situation and a situation where all of their technical employees magically work 4 hours for every 1 hour (at equal productivity without burnout) but they get zero AI assistance.
In other words, AI assistance is as useful as having their employees operate at 4x faster speeds for all activities (meetings, coding, thinking, writing, etc.) I'll call this "4x serial labor acceleration"
[1]
(see here for more discussion of this idea
[2]
).

I currently think it's very unlikely that Anthropic's AIs are yielding 4x serial labor acceleration, but if I did come to believe it was true, I would update towards radically shorter timelines. (I tentatively think my median to Automated Coder would go from 4 years from now to [...]

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Outline:

(08:21) Appendix: Estimating AI progress speed up from serial labor acceleration

(11:00) Appendix: Different notions of uplift

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

April 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jga7PHMzfZf4fbdyo/if-mythos-actually-made-anthropic-employees-4x-more

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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