These things are layered. They are great scientists, smart people, etc.

Things change when you’re running a business like Anthropic, especially as the CEO. You have a responsibility to shareholders, and you just need to play the game.

Anthropic chose a great angle: focus on professionals / enterprise, safety, etc. Those can both be done by a genuine desire to make great technology, and for business purposes require you to position yourself in a bit “better” way than reality.

Just look at what their strategy is with Mythos, it’s almost perfection: the “it’s not ready to be released to the public” angle hits all the marks: they care about responsibility / safety, they have “the best” model, and “LLMs are dangerous, but we, as the guardians, can be trusted”. This also helps the industry as a whole with regulation: if they’re being constrained, China will develop even more dangerous models.

This is a result of how smart people treat business, it’s PR perfection, especially given how much the whole industry is talking about it.

(Yes, they fail in other PR areas, but that’s a different discussion)