Anthropic’s Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign

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Thomas L. Friedman

Anthropic’s Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign

April 7, 2026,

9:02 p.m. ET

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Vincent Forstenlechner/Connected Archives

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By

Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

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Normally right now I would be writing about the geopolitical implications of the war with Iran, and I am sure I will again soon. But I want to interrupt that thought to highlight a stunning advance in artificial intelligence — one that arrived sooner than expected and that will have equally profound geopolitical implications.

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic

announced Tuesday

that it was releasing the newest generation of its large language model, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, but to only a limited consortium of roughly 40 technology companies, including Google, Broadcom, Nvidia, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Apple, JPMorganChase, Amazon and Microsoft. Some of its competitors are among these partners because this new A.I. model represents a “step change” in performance that has some critically important positive and negative implications for cybersecurity and America’s national security.

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.

This is not a publicity stunt. In the run-up to this announcement, representatives of leading tech companies have been in private conversation with the Trump administration about the implications for the security of the United States and all the other countries that use these now vulnerable software systems, technologists involved told me.

For good reason. As Anthropic said in its written statement on Tuesday, in just the past month, “Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in

every major operating system and web browser.

Given the rate of A.I. progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who committed to deploying them safely. The fallout — economics, public safety and national security — could be severe.’’

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