> Marketing is not intentional

Mythos put Anthropic back into the White House’s good graces. It also branded Anthropic as badass, something their softener image probably needed to win government contracts.

Maybe it wasn’t marketing. But the product’s configuration, and how Anthropic talked about and released it, sure as hell played beautifully. (The timing, while Musk and Altman are distracted with each other, also couldn’t have been better.)

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)

> Marketing is not intentional.

That's an odd definition of "intentional". Evolution has filtered for people with certain views and the marketing has just emerged from their actions. ... So?

A deadly virus (naturally occurring one let's say) wasn't created intentionally. Evolution selected for it. It's still bad and kills people. Doesn't make it nice because of lack of intention.

I'm not sure if that distinction is important, since what you've described less charitably synonymous with the phrase "Dario is delusional, and has surrounded himself with yes-men, so outlandish marketing gets published as a side effect".

Whether the person doing the marketing was sincere about it or not is immaterial, since marketing is experienced almost entirely by the people consuming it, and not the people communicating it. What matters is if the audience is sincerely concerned by the message, and it's transparently the case that they were sincerely concerned by it.