Mythos outruns ethos

Is it a publicity stunt? That’s the question techies have been debating since Anthropic announced that they won’t be releasing their “new frontier model” to the public. They’ve given it a wizard name, ‘Mythos’, and said it’s dangerously good at “exploiting software vulnerabilities”.

The timing is suspicious, as the company’s in a neck-and-neck race with OpenAI, to get to an IPO first. On the other hand, the warning sounds legit because a super premium group of companies (including Amazon, Apple, Google, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, Nvidia), representing “the world’s most critical software”, seems to believe it.

This group has climbed aboard ‘Project Glasswing’, where they will be Mythos-proofing their defences. There’s something they have been shown, that’s persuaded them.

So, the threat to cybersecurity is scary, in and of itself, but also because of this ‘class system’, where non-elitest-of-elite enterprises stand somewhere AI can completely pull the rug under them, while protecting the top few. For countries like India, this is, of course, very worrying.

We often take comfort from being “among the world’s most advanced AI markets”, which pertains to AI adoption, for coding, data analysis, complex reasoning.

But this is not “native” AI. The thing is, getting here without our own Google was one thing. Not a great thing, but something we could live with. Now, though, a new superapp era is coming.

Until now, the superapp meant messaging, payments, shopping, food delivery, ride-hailing, all in one space, China style.

Tomorrow, though, this could be an AI-consolidated space where we give up 25+ apps, just like we gave up 25+ passwords. So that AI becomes the primary interface for us to experience our work, finances, and personal life.

This AI will learn our behaviour, habits, goals, and, thus, start shaping them too. In this future, any country using a superapp built elsewhere, will be outsourcing its digital nervous system to a foreign power – some far company shaping how citizens think, what they see, and what feels normal to them.

Can India feel comfortable with that?

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