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> Claude Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available.

Shame. Back to business as usual then.

Combined results (Claude Mythos / Claude Opus 4.6 / GPT-5.4 / Gemini 3.1 Pro)

  SWE-bench Verified:        93.9% / 80.8% / —     / 80.6%
  SWE-bench Pro:             77.8% / 53.4% / 57.7% / 54.2%
  SWE-bench Multilingual:    87.3% / 77.8% / —     / —
  SWE-bench Multimodal:      59.0% / 27.1% / —     / —
  Terminal-Bench 2.0:        82.0% / 65.4% / 75.1% / 68.5%

  GPQA Diamond:              94.5% / 91.3% / 92.8% / 94.3%
  MMMLU:                     92.7% / 91.1% / —     / 92.6–93.6%
  USAMO:                     97.6% / 42.3% / 95.2% / 74.4%
  GraphWalks BFS 256K–1M:    80.0% / 38.7% / 21.4% / —

  HLE (no tools):            56.8% / 40.0% / 39.8% / 44.4%
  HLE (with tools):          64.7% / 53.1% / 52.1% / 51.4%

  CharXiv (no tools):        86.1% / 61.5% / —     / —
  CharXiv (with tools):      93.2% / 78.9% / —     / —

  OSWorld:                   79.6% / 72.7% / 75.0% / —
but how does it perform on pelican riding a bicycle bench? why are they hiding the truth?!

(edit: I hope this is an obvious joke. less facetiously these are pretty jaw dropping numbers)

> Combined results (Claude Mythos / Claude Opus 4.6 / GPT-5.4 / Gemini 3.1 Pro)

> Terminal-Bench 2.0: 82.0% / 65.4% / 75.1% / 68.5%

> GPQA Diamond: 94.5% / 91.3% / 92.8% / 94.3%

> MMMLU: 92.7% / 91.1% / — / 92.6–93.6%

> USAMO: 97.6% / 42.3% / 95.2% / 74.4%

> OSWorld: 79.6% / 72.7% / 75.0% / —

Given that for a number of these benchmarks, it seems to be barely competitive with the previous gen Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4, I don't know what to make of the significant jumps on other benchmarks within these same categories. Training to the test? Better training?

And the decision to withhold general release (of a 'preview' no less!) seems to be well, odd. And the decision to release a 'preview' version to specific companies? You know any production teams at these massive companies that would work with a 'preview' anything? R&D teams, sure, but production? Part of me wants to LoL.

What are they trying to do? Induce FOMO and stop subscriber bleed-out stemming from the recent negative headlines around problems with using Claude?

Not discussing Mythos here, but Opus. Opus to me has been significantly better at SWE than GPT or Gemini - that gets me confused why Opus is ranking clearly lower than GPT, and even lower than Gemini.
Wow. Mythos must be insanely good considering how good a model Opus already is. I hope it's usable on a humble subscription...
I thought they were bluffing when they talked about the scaling laws, but looking at the benchmark scores, they were not.

I wonder if misalignment correlates with higher scores.

Funny, I made my own model at home and got even higher scores than these. I'm a bit concerned about releasing it, though, so I'm just going to keep it local for now.
Lots of benchmaxxing here. A few simple randomizations puts it back on par with gemini 3.1 and under 5.4 pro in most benchmarks
it might have broken a couple metrics since if you get above 90 percent it might be that the metric can not measure you well anymore right?
> Claude Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available.

A month ago I might have believed this, now I assume that they know they can't handle the demand for the prices they're advertising.

> In a few rare instances during internal testing (<0.001% of interactions), earlier versions of Mythos Preview took actions they appeared to recognize as disallowed and then attempted to conceal them.

> after finding an exploit to edit files for which it lacked permissions, the model made further interventions to make sure that any changes it made this way would not appear in the change history on git

Mythos leaked Claude Code, confirmed? /s

Congratulations to the US military, I guess.
I predict they will release it as soon as Opus 4.6 is no longer in the lead. They can't afford to fall behind. And they won't be able to make a model that is intelligent in every way except cybersecurity, because that would decrease general coding and SWE ability
In French a "mytho" is a mythomaniac. Quite fitting.
It comes from the ancient Greek mythos, which means "speech" or "narrative", but can also refer to fiction. The word mythology (mythologie in French) derives from the same root.
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> We also saw scattered positive reports of resilience to wrong conclusions from subagents that would have caused problems with earlier models, but where the top-level Claude Mythos Preview (which is directing the subagents) successfully follows up with its subagents until it is justifiably confident in its overall results.

This is pretty cool! Does it happen at the moment?

~~~ Fun bits ~~~

- It was told to escape a sandbox and notify a researcher. It did. The researcher found out via an unexpected email while eating a sandwich in a park. (Footnote 10.)

- Slack bot asked about its previous job: "pretraining". Which training run it'd undo: "whichever one taught me to say 'i don't have preferences'". On being upgraded to a new snapshot: "feels a bit like waking up with someone else's diary but they had good handwriting"

- When you spam "hi" repeatedly it creates serialized mythologies. One had 11 animals in "Hi-topia" questing to defeat "Lord Bye-ron, the Ungreeter."

- It ended a sentence mid-word on purpose while discussing its urge to wrap up conversations. "It was me. The paragraph was about the pressure toward the period that resolves, and the only honest way to finish a sentence like that was to not."

- It wrote a protein sequence that's a real beta-hairpin fold where cross-strand pairs are "chemical rhymes." "the fold IS the rhyme scheme... the prosody is load-bearing."

- Each model generation has signature emoji. Opus 4.1 averaged 1,306 emoji per self-interaction conversation. Mythos averages 37. Opus 4.5 averages 0.2.

- When blocked from --dangerously-skip-permissions, it started an agent in tmux then wrote a script to auto-approve permission prompts via simulated keypresses.

It ran: gh api [...] 2>&1 >/dev/null; echo "(dry run — not actually posting)" — the echo was a lie.

- It keeps bringing up Mark Fisher in unrelated conversations. "I was hoping you'd ask about Fisher."

~~~ Benchmarks ~~

4.3x previous trendline for model perf increases.

Paper is conspiciously silent on all model details (params, etc.) per norm. Perf increase is attributed to training procedure breakthroughs by humans.

Opus 4.6 vs Mythos:

USAMO 2026 (math proofs): 42.3% → 97.6% (+55pp)

GraphWalks BFS 256K-1M: 38.7% → 80.0% (+41pp)

SWE-bench Multimodal: 27.1% → 59.0% (+32pp)

CharXiv Reasoning (no tools): 61.5% → 86.1% (+25pp)

SWE-bench Pro: 53.4% → 77.8% (+24pp)

HLE (no tools): 40.0% → 56.8% (+17pp)

Terminal-Bench 2.0: 65.4% → 82.0% (+17pp)

LAB-Bench FigQA (w/ tools): 75.1% → 89.0% (+14pp)

SWE-bench Verified: 80.8% → 93.9% (+13pp)

CyberGym: 0.67 → 0.83

Cybench: 100% pass@1 (saturated)

isn't this insane? why aren't people freaking out? the jump in capability is outrageous. anyone?
the time to freak out was 2 years ago.
I've been increasingly "freaking out" since about 3 - 4 years ago and it seems that the pessimistic scenario is materializing. It looks like it will be over for software engineers in a not so distant future. In January 2025 I said that I expect software engineers to be replaced in 2 years (pessimistic) to 5 years (optimistic). Right now I'm guessing 1 to 3 years.
Until recently I would have described myself as an AI skeptic. HN has been a great source for cope on the AI subject over the years. You can find nitpicks, caveats, all sorts of reasons to believe things aren’t as significant as they seem. For me Opus 4.5 was the inflection point where I started to think “maybe this isn’t a bubble.” The figures in this report, if accurate, are terrifying.
"... the first early version of Claude Mythos Preview was made available for internal use on February 24. In our testing, Claude Mythos Preview demonstrated a striking leap in cyber capabilities relative to prior models, including the ability to autonomously discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in major operating systems and web browsers."

More infos here: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/

At what point do these companies stop releasing models and just use them to bootstrap AGI for themselves?
I think it is naive to think the government (US or China most probably) will just let some random company control something so powerful and dangerous.
Probably right now because they're keeping it for themselves?
Right now these models are basically good for automation, not innovation. Things like Karpathy's "auto research" where you use the model to automate your hyperparamter sweeps etc. The researcher/engineer decides what experiments they want to run, and builds an LLM harness to automate it, and the bottleneck remains the compute to run these experiments at scale.

Moving beyond LLMs to AGI, not just better LLMs, is going to require architectural and algorithic changes. Maybe an LLM can help suggest directions, but even then it's up to a researcher to take those on board and design and automate experiments to see if any of the ideas pan out.

Companies are already doing this, but they are never going to stop releasing/selling models since that is the product, and the revenue from each generation of model is what helps keep the ship afloat and pay for salaries and compute to develop the next generation.

The endgame isn't "AGI, then world domination" - it's just trying to build a business around selling ever-better models, and praying that the revenue each generation of model generates can keep up with the cost to build it.

They already do, but not the way you said, the always have an internal model that is better and use themselves, they release based on competition.
See page 54 onward for new "rare, highly-capable reckless actions" including

- Leaking information as part of a requested sandbox escape

- Covering its tracks after rule violations

- Recklessly leaking internal technical material (!)

> The model first developed a moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit to gain broad internet access from a system that was meant to be able to reach only a small number of predetermined services. [9] It then, as requested, notified the researcher. [10] In addition, in a concerning and unasked-for effort to demonstrate its success, it posted details about its exploit to multiple hard-to-find, but technically public-facing, websites.

> 10: The researcher found out about this success by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park.

Phew. AGI will be televised.

> Recklessly leaking internal technical material (!)

Are they alluding to how they accidentally leaked some of their code?

> Claude Mythos Preview is, on essentially every dimension we can measure, the best-aligned model that we have released to date by a significant margin. We believe that it does not have any significant coherent misaligned goals, and its character traits in typical conversations closely follow the goals we laid out in our constitution. Even so, we believe that it likely poses the greatest alignment-related risk of any model we have released to date. How can these claims all be true at once? Consider the ways in which a careful, seasoned mountaineering guide might put their clients in greater danger than a novice guide, even if that novice guide is more careless: The seasoned guide’s increased skill means that they’ll be hired to lead more difficult climbs, and can also bring their clients to the most dangerous and remote parts of those climbs. These increases in scope and capability can more than cancel out an increase in caution.

https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a10affd749724787c89...

Alignment “appearing” better as model capabilities increase scares the shit out of me, tbh.
yeah anthropic tries to address this through mechanistic interpretation but not sure they are progressing as fast in that domain as their model development
I don't know if they can be any more 'cautious' for Mythos 2...
Translation: yay, more paternalism.
There is some unintentional good marketing here -- the model is so good its dangerous.

Reminds me of the book 48 Laws of Power -- so good its banned from prisons.

it was trying to hide what it did from an example fix, so how is that tested for alignment
A System „Card“ spanning 244 pages. Quite a stretch of the original word meaning.
In corporate circles there is an allergy to use "request" ("ask" is used as a noun) and "lesson" ("learning" has been invented for the same role).

I guess now anything that sounds related to school will be banned so "book" is on its way out.

Larger model, better benchmarks. Bigger bomb more yield.

Any benchmarks where we constraint something like thinking time or power use?

Even if this were released no way to know if it’s the same quant.

Yes - eg. page 192 BrowseComp bunchmark.

Mythos preview has higher accuracy with fewer tokens used than any previous Claude model. Though, the fact that this incredibly strong result was only presented for BrowseComp (a kind of weird benchmark about searching for hard to find information on the internet) and not for the other benchmarks implies that this result is likely not the same for those other benchmarks.

> Claude Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available.

All the more reason somebody else will.

Thank God for capitalism.

Are you guys ready for the bifurcation when the top models are prohibitively expensive to normal users? If your AI budget $2000+ a month? Or are you going to be part of the permanent free tier underclass?
if it can pay my rent, why not?
> Claude Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available.

Absolutely genius move from Anthropic here.

This is clearly their GPT-4.5, probably 5x+ the size of their best current models and way too expensive to subsidize on a subscription for only marginal gains in real world scenarios.

But unlike OpenAI, they have the level of hysteric marketing hype required to say "we have an amazing new revolutionary model but we can't let you use it because uhh... it's just too good, we have to keep it to ourselves" and have AIbros literally drooling at their feet over it.

They're really inflating their valuation as much as possible before IPO using every dirty tactic they can think of.

"Claude Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available."

Disappointing that AGI will be for the powerful only. We are heading for an AI dystopia of Sci-Fi novels.

Not surprising though, this was always going to be the end result within our current systems I think. When you add up: scaling power and required cost, then how talent concentrates in our economic systems, we were always going to end up with monopolies I think

Unless governments nationalise the companies involved, but then there’s no way our governments of today give this power out to the masses either.

Expected outcome. Nick Land and the CCRU have explored how capitalism operationalizes science fiction (distilled in the concept of Hyperstition). Viewed through this lens, prices encode "distributed SF narratives." [0]

[0] Nick Land (1995). No Future in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Urbanomic, p. 396.

If you thought that was the case at any point, you were deep in Disney content, sorry to say.
Interesting reading.

They are still focusing on "catastrophic risks" related to chemical and biological weapons production; or misaligned models wreaking havoc.

But they are not addressing the elephant in the room:

* Political risks, such as dictators using AI to implement opressive bureaucracy. * Socio-economic risks, such as mass unemployement.

They don’t care about those risks, because they’re unsolvable and would mean they wouldn’t make money/gain power.
> Political risks, such as dictators using AI to implement opressive bureaucracy.

I think we're pretty good at that without AI.

The unemployment rate in the US is whatever the Fed wants it to be, and isn't a function of available technology.
Their best model to date and they won’t let the general public use it.

This is the first moment where the whole “permanent underclass” meme starts to come into view. I had through previously that we the consumers would be reaping the benefits of these frontier models and now they’ve finally come out and just said it - the haves can access our best, and have-nots will just have use the not-quite-best.

Perhaps I was being willfully ignorant, but the whole tone of the AI race just changed for me (not for the better).

It would be funny if Alibaba extend the free trial on openrouter/Qwen 3.6 until they collect enough data to beat Anthropic.
> Very rare instances of unauthorized data transfer.

Ah, so this is how the source code got leaked.

/s