The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic shows no signs of cooling off. In a recent podcast interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took aim at his competitor's latest cybersecurity model, suggesting the company is employing fear tactics to exaggerate its product's capabilities. Anthropic unveiled Mythos earlier this month, offering it to a select group of enterprise clients. The firm has argued that Mythos is too potent for a public release, citing risks that cybercriminals could misuse it—a stance some critics have called exaggerated.

During his conversation on the "Core Memory" podcast, Altman hinted that Anthropic's "fear-based marketing" strategy serves to concentrate advanced AI within a narrow, privileged circle. "There are people in the world who, for a long time, have wanted to keep AI in the hands of a smaller group of people," he remarked. "You can justify that in a lot of different ways."

He elaborated with a pointed analogy: "It is clearly incredible marketing to say, 'We have built a bomb, we are about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million.'" While Anthropic didn't pioneer fear-based marketing, much of the AI sector has arguably relied on alarmist rhetoric and overstatement to highlight the power of its offerings. Warnings that AI could precipitate global catastrophe haven't only come from pessimistic skeptics; they've also been voiced by the very figures marketing the technology—Altman himself included.