What Anthropic’s too-dangerous-to-release AI model means for its upcoming IPO

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.

The new AI model is called Claude Mythos, and it’s the first one Anthropic has publicly deemed too high-risk for public release. (If that name is familiar to you, it’s probably because you heard it here first a few weeks ago when Fortune broke the story about blog posts referencing the model discovered on a publicly-accessible data trove.) Rival AI lab OpenAI once made a similar call back in 2019 by initially withholding GPT-2 over concerns it could be misused to generate convincing fake text—a time when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was still working for Sam Altman.

This time, Amodei is taking a different approach. The company said on Tuesday it was rolling out Mythos through an invitation-only initiative called Project Glasswing, restricted to defensive cybersecurity work and limited to around 40 organizations. It’s aimed at giving cyber defenders a head start on securing some of the world’s most critical software systems from the looming security risks posed by advanced AI models and includes partners such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco.

But what does all of this mean for Anthropic’s standing in the AI race and its rumored upcoming IPO? A few things.

As my colleague Jeremy Kahn notes, Anthropic has been on a bit of a tear recently. The company has hit a $30 billion annual revenue run rate—a figure that implies a 58% revenue surge in March alone, and edges past the $25 billion run rate OpenAI reported in February. (The comparison isn’t exact as the two companies calculate run rates differently, but the direction of both paths is clear.)

Now, the company has developed a model that, according to its own benchmarks, significantly outperforms its competitors. It’s also found a way to forge an even closer partnership with some of the biggest players in enterprise tech. This is all in spite of the company’s very public fight with the Trump administration and two accidental, but high-profile, leaks.

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.........

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