Anthropic's Mythos: One moderate step forward for white-hat hacking; one giant leap forward for journalists' credulity

[I kid, of course. That particular shark was jumped ages ago.] You should probably approach any story of large language models displaying initiative, or trying to mislead or blackmail users, or generally doing anything of the sort with the same mindset you approach accounts of paranormal activity. In both cases, virtually all the reporting will be sensationalistic, anecdotal, and likely to collapse under scrutiny.Example du jour, Anthropic is getting an enormous amount of sky-is-falling coverage over what appears to be the development of a good but hardly revolutionary white-hat hacking tool. Here's Gary Marcus's assessment:To a certain degree, I feel that we were played. The demo was definitely proof of concept that we need to get our regulatory and technical house in order, but not the immediate threat the media and public was lead to believe. Not only has the reporting been credulous and incurious, it has largely ignored the ever-present elephants in the room when discussing…