Why AI Companies Want You to Be Afraid of Them

You may have heard a story like this before. A technology company announces a powerful new AI. It claims the system is so capable that releasing it would be dangerous, so for now the company is keeping it locked away. This is exactly what Anthropic is saying about its latest model, Claude Mythos. According to the company, Mythos can find security flaws in computer code better than human experts. The results could be severe for the economy and for national security if similar tools end up in the wrong hands.

Some security experts doubt these claims, but the bigger question is why AI executives so often warn about their own products. It is a strange way for any business to behave. You do not hear McDonald's announce that it has created a burger so dangerously tasty that selling it would be wrong. Yet leaders at the largest AI firms keep telling the public that their tools may destroy society. If they truly believe this, why are they still building and selling them?

Critics offer one answer. Shannon Vallor, a professor of AI ethics at the University of Edinburgh, argues that talking about an AI apocalypse keeps customers and lawmakers focused on a distant threat. Meanwhile, the harm these systems are already causing goes ignored. This pattern, she suggests, is a form of fear mongering: companies exaggerate the power of their products to lift stock prices and to send a useful message to governments. The message is that only the AI firms themselves can be trusted to manage the danger, so regulators should step back. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, recently called Anthropic's approach fear-based marketing, although Altman has used very similar language about his own products for years.

Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington and co-author of the book The AI Con, sees the same pattern. She says the constant talk of extinction directs attention away from problems that already exist, such as environmental damage, exploited workers, and social systems being weakened by these tools. Other researchers question whether Anthropic's safety claims about Mythos can even be checked. Heidy Khlaaf of the AI Now Institute notes that Anthropic has not shared standard measurements security engineers normally rely on. The threat may be real, she says, but the evidence so far is thin.

The history of these companies makes the warnings harder to trust. OpenAI began as a non-profit, meaning it was set up to serve the public rather than make money for owners. Later, a splinter group left OpenAI and founded Anthropic, saying that their old employer was not careful enough about safety. Today both are working to become publicly traded companies, which would let investors buy shares in them on the stock market. At the same time, Google has dropped its red lines against helping to build AI weapons, and Anthropic has quietly abandoned its old promise never to train a model without strong safety guarantees. As Vallor puts it, you should not expect any of these firms to walk away from market dominance just to remain the good guys.

The same executives who warn of disaster also promise paradise: a cure for the climate crisis, colonies in space, a future of brilliant ideas. Vallor argues that apocalypse and utopia are two sides of the same coin. Both make AI feel too vast for ordinary rules to touch, which suits the companies very well. Yet AI tools are not gods. They are products built for profit, and societies have regulated things far more powerful, from nuclear weapons to biological research. Deepfakes may have crossed the point of no return, but most AI harms have not. We were once told that Bitcoin would replace world currencies and that social media would save democracy. Perhaps the latest predictions will come true. Or perhaps they will quietly fade.