“Fear is a man’s best friend” is yet another great John Cale song. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has been listening.
In the Cyberwar arms race, Dario intends to lead, especially in the “scaring the pants off stakes”. There must be an IPO in the offing.
Way back in the day, as an ERP product manager, a moment’s scribble on the back of an envelope revealed the obvious: that off-piste explorations of the process path would lead to an unpleasant demise of reliable functionality. It was too complicated to test everything so just “don’t go there”.
Bill Gates, a past master at legedermain has been playing the game since DOS V1.0, a game that continues to infuriate to this day. In a masterful Twainian twist, (though it is unlikely there have been any royalty payments to the Twain Estate)
he has persuaded his gasping acolytes that beta-testing for free is a privilege (See “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”).
Dario has amped it up. “Mythos” stalks the earth, remorselessly shining its light into the the murky depths of ancient code to reveal, quoting the Economist “Artificial Intelligence, Mythical Monster April 11th-17th 2026” that “severe vulnerabilities have been found in every major operating system and web browser, including one that had gone undetected for 27 years”.
In other news, there are bugs in software, especially in the dismal outpourings of early internet explorations, as decades of software engineering principles were trashed on the alter of cheap labour in the 1990’s; not an unfamiliar tale.
Act in haste, repent, expensively, at leisure.
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