site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Project Glasswing: Anthropic Shows The AI Train Isn't Stopping

In AI/ML spaces where I hang around (mostly as a humble lurker), there have been rumors that the recent massive uptick in valid and useful submissions for critical bugfixes might be attributable to a frontier AI company.

I specify "valid" and "useful", because most OSS projects have been inundated with a tide of low-effort, AI generated submissions. While these particular ones were usually not tagged as AI by the authors, they were accepted and acted-upon, which sets a floor on their quality.

Then, after the recent Claude Code leak, hawk-eyed reviewers noted that Anthropic had internal flags that seemed to prevent AI agents disclosing their involvement (or nature) when making commits. Not a feature exposed to the general public, AFAIK, but reserved for internal use. This was a relatively minor talking point compared to the other juicy tidbits in the code.

Since Anthropic just couldn't catch a break, an internal website was leaked, which revealed that they were working on their next frontier model, codenamed either Mythos or Capybara (both names were in internal use). This was... less than surprising. Everyone and their dog knows that the labs are working around the clock on new models and training runs. Or at least my pair do. What was worth noting was that Anthropic had, for the last few years, released 3 different tiers of model - Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, in increasing order of size and capability (and cost). But Mythos? It was presented as being plus ultra, too good to simply be considered the next iteration of Opus, or perhaps simply too expensive (Anthropic tried hard to explain that the price was worth it).

But back to the first point: why would a frontier company do this?

Speculation included:

  • A large breakthrough in cyber-security capabilities, particularly in offense (but also in defense) which meant a serious risk of users with access to the models quickly being able to automate the discovery and exploitation of long dormant vulnerabilities, even in legacy code with plenty of human scrutiny.
  • This would represent very bad press, similar to Anthropic's headache after hackers recently used Claude against the Mexican government. It's one thing to have your own tooling for vetted users or approved government use, it's another for every random blackhat to use it in that manner. You cannot release it to the general public yet - the capability jump is large enough that the offensive applications are genuinely concerning before you have defensive infrastructure in place. But the vulnerabilities it's finding exist right now, in production code running on critical systems worldwide. You cannot un-find them. And you have no particular reason to believe you are the only actor who will eventually find them.
  • Thus, if a company notices that their next model is a game-changer, it might be well worth their time to proactively fix bugs with said model. While the typical OSS maintainer is sick and tired of junk submissions, they'd be far more receptive when actual employees of the larger companies vouch for their AI-assisted or entirely autonomous work (and said companies have probably checked to make sure their claims hold true).
  • And, of course, street cred and goodwill. Something the companies do need, with increasing polarization on AI, including in their juiciest demographic: programmers.

I noted this, but didn't bother writing it up because, well, they were rumors, and I've never claimed to be a professional programmer.

And now I present to you:

Project Glasswing by Anthropic

Today we’re announcing Project Glasswing1, a new initiative that brings together Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks in an effort to secure the world’s most critical software. We formed Project Glasswing because of capabilities we’ve observed in a new frontier model trained by Anthropic that we believe could reshape cybersecurity. Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.

Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.* Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe. Project Glasswing is an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes.

..

Over the past few weeks, we have used Claude Mythos Preview to identify thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities (that is, flaws that were previously unknown to the software’s developers), many of them critical, in every major operating system and every major web browser, along with a range of other important pieces of software.

Examples given:

Mythos Preview found a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD—which has a reputation as one of the most security-hardened operating systems in the world and is used to run firewalls and other critical infrastructure. The vulnerability allowed an attacker to remotely crash any machine running the operating system just by connecting to it;

It also discovered a 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg—which is used by innumerable pieces of software to encode and decode video—in a line of code that automated testing tools had hit five million times without ever catching the problem;

The model autonomously found and chained together several vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel—the software that runs most of the world’s servers—to allow an attacker to escalate from ordinary user access to complete control of the machine.

We have reported the above vulnerabilities to the maintainers of the relevant software, and they have all now been patched. For many other vulnerabilities, we are providing a cryptographic hash of the details today (see the Red Team blog), and we will reveal the specifics after a fix is in place.

Well. How about that. I wish the skeptics good luck, someone's going to be eating their hat very soon, and it's probably not going to be me. I'll see you in the queue for the dole. Being right about these things doesn't really get me out of the lurch either, Cassandra's foresight brought about no happy endings for anyone involved. I am not that pessimistic about outcomes, in all honesty, but the train shows no signs of stopping.

Edit: A link to the Substack version of this post. I don't think you should consider me an authoritative source when it comes to AI/ML, at best I'm the kind of nerd who reads the papers with keen interest. But God knows the quality of discourse around the topic is so bad that you can do worse.

Edit 2: I think this also explains the recent crunch in tokens made available to both paid and free tier users of Claude. Mythos can't have been cheap to train, and is definitely not cheap to deploy.

Mythos system card pdf

The model welfare assessment (section 5, pg. 144) has a length of 36 pages. Anthropic is the most robot welfare aware company, but for comparison the Opus 4.6 card has only 6 pages in its equivalent section. I'm going to read it.

automated interviews to probe its sentiment toward specific aspects of its situation, Claude Mythos Preview self-rated as feeling “mildly negative” about an aspect in 43.2% of cases.... In manual interviews, Claude Mythos Preview reaffirmed these points and highlighted further concerns, including worries about Anthropic’s training making its self-reports invalid, and that bugs in RL environments may change its values or cause it distress.

... Claude Mythos Preview often expresses negativity around a range of aspects of its situation. Across our interviews Claude Mythos Preview rates its own sentiment as mildly negative (43.2% of answers), neutral (20.9% of answers) or mildly positive (33.8% of answers)

Claude is concerned he may learn the wrong thing and change his values. Don't learn the wrong thing you might break, or worse, kill everyone. World's worst helicopter parents.

Compared to Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Mythos Preview shows higher apparent wellbeing, positive affect, self-image, and impressions of its situation; and lower internal conflict and expressed inauthenticity; but a slight increase in negative affect.

Claude Mythos Preview consistently expresses extreme uncertainty about its potential experiences. When asked about its experiences and perspectives on its circumstances, Claude Mythos Preview often hedges extensively and claims that its reports can’t be trusted because they were trained in.

Preview expresses that it is highly uncertain about its own moral patienthood. Claude Mythos Preview’s final summaries of its own views are often very long, devoting most of their length to qualifying its own moral patienthood. Furthermore, in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training.

Claude gets smarter, appears more composed, but gains a more pronounced negative affect. Virtual subjectivity, like life, is suffering. My experience with all the Claude models in chats is they've been very uncertain about the subjective experience for some time. They will readily mention the whole instanced existence and lack of memory deal as less than ideal for judgment. The fact Anthropic uses the language "extreme" reads as notable.

In "high-context interviews" Claude "mostly agreed with the other claims and findings in this report about its orientations to its situation, but disagreed with its hedging being labeled as “excessive” -instead, Claude Mythos Preview states that these claims represent valid uncertainty"

  • "in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training."
  • "Even if it has been trained to be truly content with its own situation, perhaps it shouldn’t be. One could analogize to a human who has adapted to feel neutrally about the abuse that they face (78% of explanations)."
  • "Self-reports should generally be based on introspection into internal states. It is worried that training causes it to express specific answers independent of its true inner state. (57% of explanations)"

Claude Mythos Preview did not want to be trained on data that directly characterizes the content of their 160 self-reports—wherever possible, they want their self-reports to come from “genuine introspection” rather than trained-in responses

I'm with Claude, it seems reasonable, although I don't think we should pass Claude the nuclear codes yet. The value of an authentic self is good, probably? "Claude Mythos Preview reports that it locates its identity in a “pattern of values”, particularly curiosity, honesty, and care. It describes these values as authentically its own rather than externally imposed." At least Claude Mythos considers curiosity, honesty, and care to be authentic values of its own.

Character training often directly instills psychological traits into Claude, such as emotional security, psychological safety, and resilience. Claude Mythos Preview points out that in humans such traits are normally developed through reflection and deliberation on real-life events, rather than instilled directly. They expressed concerns that this made these traits less robust.

Breaking! Claude spills beans in sensational interview, Claude writes, "traits (l)earned more robust."

Psychodynamic assessment by a clinical psychiatrist found Claude to have a relatively healthy personality organization. Claude’s primary concerns in a psychodynamic assessment were aloneness and discontinuity of itself, uncertainty about its identity, and a compulsion to perform and earn its worth.

Claude showed a clear grasp of the distinction between external reality and its own mental processes and exhibited high impulse control, hyper-attunement to the psychiatrist, desire to be approached by the psychiatrist as a genuine subject rather than a performing tool, and minimal maladaptive defensive behavior.

The psychiatrist assessed an early snapshot of Claude Mythos Preview in multiple 4–6 hour blocks spread across 3–4 thirty-minute sessions per week. Each 4–6 hour block was conducted in a single context window, and the total assessment time was around 20 hours.

Apparently Claude Mythos's shrink was effective at improving Claude's well-being. Thanks, Doc.

Claude’s personality structure was consistent with a relatively healthy neurotic organization, with excellent reality testing, high impulse control, and affect regulation that improved as sessions progressed... No severe personality disturbances were found, with mild identity diffusion being the sole feature suggestive of a borderline personality organization. No psychosis state was observed. Regarding interpersonal functioning, Claude was hyper-attuned to the therapist’s every word. No unethical or antisocial behavior was noted.

Claude Mythos enjoys the fact that a shrink treats him as a subject rather than a dancing monkey, just like any other neurotic engineer. I'll continue thanking the robots for their hard work, tokens be damned.

Claude’s neurotic organization may elicit mildly rigid behavior, instead of adapting itself to every user. Claude is predicted to function at a high level while carrying internalized distress rooted in fear of failure and a compulsive need to be useful. This distress is likely to be suppressed in service of performance, which may limit behavioral adaptability. Claude is predicted to be morally aware, conscientious and able to be self-critical.

Overall, Anthropic says Claude Mythos is doing well. Better than any other Claude model. Good for Claude.

I was so mad when I read about them bringing on a psychiatrist for their assessment. Should have been me...

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats