Sam Altman accused Anthropic of fear-based marketing with Claude Mythos, comparing it to dropping a bomb while selling a bomb shelter

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Anthropic of using fear-based marketing to sell Claude Mythos, telling podcaster Ashlee Vance that restricting the model to a handful of select organizations while warning of its cybersecurity capabilities was “clearly incredible marketing” akin to saying “we have built a bomb, we were about to drop it on your head, we will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million.” Altman suggested that some in tech use safety concerns to justify keeping AI in the hands of a smaller group of people, arguing that OpenAI will err on the side of broader releases and giving more people access to powerful technology. Altman also suggested Anthropic's public framing of AI risk is partly responsible for the hostile environment that led to an attack on his home, and said the way Anthropic talks about OpenAI publicly “doesn't help.” These statements coming from the same guy who at one point had conversations behind closed doors about pitting world powers like China and Russia against each other in a bidding war for the OpenAI's technology, saying “it worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?”