Marketing is like propaganda. It doesn't need to be based on false facts. Of course they're gonna milk it, keep it private and so on. But that doesn't mean the model is bad. Or that others are as good (apparently they're not there yet).
[1] - https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-openais-gpt-5...
If that doesn't convince you that both mythos and 5.5 are a step up (several steps, hah) nothing will.
If I was given free access to any frontier model to use on my projects, equivalent of millions of dollars in AI credits, I sure hope people didn't trust anything that came out of my mouth until they were able to verify my claims themselves.
AI industry has even resulted in a new term - benchmaxing - which essentially means we can't even trust the data anymore until we can touch the model ourselves. So this is not at all surprising to me. What's surprising is why am I in the minority here, and since when trusting authorities that have obvious conflicts of interest became normal.
This just seems overly conspiratorial to me. I don't remember Anthropic ever lying in their blog posts. They've been about as consistent as Apple when it comes to product claims.