Probably more interesting than the 4.8 release.
It is widely suspected that self-inflicted "bad news" ("Mythos is so dangerous we just can't give the public access to it") is nothing more than Dario's typical style of marketing - keep in mind that they have an IPO coming up, because he certainly factors that into everything he says in public (as is his responsibility, to be fair).
An alternative reason for delaying the model might not be "we are trying to make it safe." It could be "we don't know how to host this thing at scale, or cost-effectively".
GPT 5.5 has already been shown to be as adept as Mythos at finding vulnerabilities.
Finally, laymen massively underestimate the importance of the harness for model performance. OpenHands existed long before Claude Code, Claude Code changed everything because of the clever hand-holding it does. Mythos is definitely more than just a model.
The main limitation we’ve had to agentic coding is an understanding of this system that spans processes running on different machines and architectures.
* Ralph Wiggum loops
* Simply not allowing an agent to stop its turn until all tasks are marked as done
* Sub agents over worktrees
* Context compression
This suggests that they're doing the same thing with Mythos now and the Mythos we get will be nerfed in that department?
Or more precisely, I think they'll have two versions of Mythos, and the scary one will probably continue to require a lot of paperwork.
Sonnet and Haiku look real outclassed for the price with current Chinese competition.
Opus seems to be overly eager of late to 'vibe' out entire solutions and build out things that you didn't ask for.
/goals is helping set the narrative that does it really matter if Sonnet and 3 Haiku agents got you to that end state...eventually...if its what you asked for?
For better or worse Opus is already handing off 80% of its work to background agents of Sonnet, Haiku, and likely a quantized Opus.
Want model selection? Pay for the API.
> Claude Code Removed from $20-a-Month "Pro" Subscription for New Users
Hope this isn’t the case and that normal average Joe’s of the world don’t get policed out of access.
Unless it's so expensive that we can't realistically use it for anything, I wouldn't complain about getting at least that. I would also rather have the actual model, but that's a useful application of it (and I'm probably not going to afford using it for much more).
Although mental safety gymnastics aside, getting the most amount of intelligence for the cheapest amount of cost to normal people seems like the most ethical thing a big lab could do.
Going around and granting different tiers of intelligence to different insiders, friends, or companies is majorly problematic long-term.
Heck right now, the tokens you buy today for “Opus 4.8”, no one even knows or believes will be the same “Opus 4.8” just 3 days from now.
this one [0] notes one run cost $20k to run but another cost $50.
But in general, what does the average Joe need Opus for that Sonnet or Haiku can't do for them? Better is better.
The fact that they haven't released it yet suggests a cost/margins issue to me more than anything else. Short term, I'll probably keep using Antrhopic, but my long-term bet is that locally-served models win, if only because the quest for profitability will probably lead to intentionally-nerfed / enshittified frontier models.
At other vendors, ad placement within LLM responses is either coming or already here. Anthropic's handling of OpenClaw shows they're willing to engage in anti-competitive behavior, and the courts are not in a hurry to stop them. Why would I pay them $200 a month for such treatment when a $2K box does what I need locally?
We did not explicitly train Mythos Preview to have these capabilities. Rather, they emerged as a downstream consequence of general improvements in code, reasoning, and autonomy. The same improvements that make the model substantially more effective at patching vulnerabilities also make it substantially more effective at exploiting them.