Not Much is Half of What You See

So, the boys and girls over at the USS Mis Anthropic have decided to ‘wrap the world around their finger’ having tried unsuccessfully with the first round of legal fare with a paying customer, namely Uncle Sam. The new game is to make your company indispensable so disgruntled users cannot throw the AI model out like a baby with the bath water. And, also, because the new code is so powerful and potentially harmful we (Anthropic) are going to greatly restrict the distribution, only giving special access of ‘Mythos’ to our partners that stood by us during this difficult time (Microsoft, Amazon, and the usual cast of Tech Bro suspects) and big banks (more on that in a moment). Caution though, lest ‘The things you own end up owning you,’ Mad Max 1979 – a wonderful and quirky Australian Sci-Fi flick on the must-see list if you are looking for a glimpse of what happens when the cult of death gets the nuclear weapons codes.

Not sure who at Anthropic produced that name, Mythos. They might have asked Claude to conjure up something, stranded somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis, or their marketing execs were on a beach in Greece trying to go deep but ended up shallow with a ‘contemporary Greek lager with rich foam, shiny blonde color and pleasant refreshing taste.’  If you are not a beer person, we’re certain that Carlsberg group will not be offended since they have 705 selections for people that do Products » Mythos » Mythos « Carlsberg Group. Let us stick with the Greek definition of Mythos for sake of simplicity, originally spelled μῦθος – defined as a myth, fairy tale, or story. Have we got a whopper for you.

In terms of the new and improved indispensable partner narrative track, Bloomberg reports that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo circulated this week and marks the first formal green light for Cabinet-level departments to tap Mythos’s unprecedented cybersecurity capabilities.

Just WOW, why the 180?

The model itself falls under Project Glasswing, the company’s broader cybersecurity initiative—and claims it can locate “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities” in code across “every major operating system and web browser,” the company says on its website. That means, the new system has read every document on cyber vulnerability available to the Mythos AI. This is one category in Information Technology (IT) where there is no shortage of published information – everyone hates to get hacked, and most of the major Cyber Security firms and even the US Government openly publish information of the different threats and approaches the bad guys used or are currently using everywhere at any given moment in time – ‘it’s a free concert’ as Simon and Garfunkel would say.

With all that Tech the US has invested in over the past 250 years, from hand cyphers to digital cryptography and super computers, we still have a deep-seated problem protecting our own information. The recently developed AI model from Anthropic is aimed at improving cybersecurity of course, along with all of the other things it sort of does. The government has a substantial cache of Claude entitlements so they might as well be put to beneficial use, right?

Oh, but there is a catch, there is always a catch. It is not all apple pi because the model risks exploiting a key vulnerability in the financial sector, introducing risks ranging from widespread identity theft to the destabilization of the financial system, the American Securities Association said. Anthropic’ s Mythos AI tool could spark ‘systemic financial market disruption,’ a trade group warns. This new information was enough to get Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell involved: Powell, Bessent met with U.S. Bank CEOs over Anthropic’s Mythos threat.

But not a big deal, really. Trust us.

And that folks is how you make lemonade out of lemons or make the most out of the demand destruction of your own making last month – good thing for Anthropic that they are still a private company. It remains unclear how ‘Mythos’ will be deployed – Peter Thiel’s Mephisto himself lurks in the details Peter Thiel brings his lectures on the Antichrist to the Vatican’s doorstep | PBS News.

What you need to understand is that running a tool like this can create even greater vulnerabilities across these systems. For those of you not working in IT, best practice dictates that as a business owner or operations executive you would rarely if ever want any tool running across your environments untethered, particularly one with a mind of its own and a long memory.

Even McKinsey, in the latest edition of the Quarterly, concedes that AI in general terms poses certain risks such that ‘organizations will need to wall in proprietary organizational context, institutional knowledge, and nonpublic data for competitiveness’ — aka their own protection. The Agentic Organization, Alexis Krivkovic (Bay Area), Arsen Storozhev (Amsterdam), Deepak Mahadevan (Brussels), Lari Hamalainen (Seattle), and Sandra Durth (Cologne).

At CloudNineData, we vehemently agree! Infrastructure for Information Technology | Solutions. If you build it, you decide what you retain and what you outsource. What you share with public or even enterprise class AI platforms should never include your critical business data.

What is really going on with the US Government’s about face on Anthropic sounds a little bit like this to us: ‘Yeah, we know we screwed up before when we told you that you couldn’t use our tool for war and domestic surveillance of bad guys the way you wanted to, but we want to show you how valuable you are to us, so we are giving you this special once in a lifetime access to our amazing and potentially life ending AI tool we affectionately refer to as Mad Max but you can call it Mythos. Just press this ‘easy’ button and Mythos the ‘Destroyer’ will traverse your systems, eliminate all vulnerabilities, and put you on the happy path to a November victory for the mid-terms. And if you displace us our tool might wreck the entire global financial system though. Sorry.

Mephistopheles may not be your name, (but) ‘I (we) know what you’re up to just the same’ – Wrapped Around Your Finger, words and lyrics by the Police.

You cannot make this up. Well, we just did. But you get the point.

Our view is that Trust will not be back on the menu anytime soon with Anthropic at least from a Department of War perspective. We do suspect the Federal Agencies themselves will run down threats and vulnerability with atavistic rigor. There is no shortage of bad actors out there that hate us and our way of life as a matter principle and we have to defend ourselves or suffer the consequences.

This too shall pass. The Cryptographic, Security, and Large Language Model worlds are going to change significantly in the next few years. Anthropic, OpenAI and others may not even get to the IPO stage before Quantum turns the tables on everyone. Forgetting about light speed, Quantum is moving forward at atomic speed. Caltech Team Sets Record with 6,100-Qubit Array – www.caltech.edu

Coming around full circle (π), have a great month and remember, commodities are on the Buy with Conviction list. And, if you are bullish about the re-industrialization of the USA, Madison Air (MAIR), a Data Center Cooling solutions company, went public yesterday rocketing into the upper end of their target range, $32.03 per share. We would recommend that you wait a few months before taking a big position, but you might take a baby step at this point, particularly if you are interested in the Data Center market. We will rip through about $800B in CAPEX this year on Data Centers and infrastructure across the industry – with all the hot air you need a lot of cooling.

Do not get wrapped around the axle dear friends, just roll with it when chaos comes calling. And remember that a…

Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Sets him apart
From every other creature
On earth.

• Das Göttliche (The Divine) (1783)