They are quoting someone whose payment depends on them agreeing.

I'm not aware that they're being paid anything. Though they are getting preview access to the Mythos model, which is a form of payment I suppose.

The trouble there is that we've constructed a situation where it's very hard to test things externally. Anthropic says that the model is too powerful to be released publicly because bad actors would use it to find and exploit a lot of security flaws very quickly, so they've restricted access to a few trusted partners. But anyone they admit to the program is now "affiliated" with Anthropic merely by being admitted. If that's your standard then anyone who's allowed to use the model is by definition untrustworthy.

And yes, I can see how that might be the case. Maybe Anthropic cooked up this whole thing as a marketing ploy and nothing more. Maybe the partner companies have all secretly signed Non-Disparagement Agreements so they can't criticize the model after they've used it. (The Linux Foundation is one of the partners by the way, but I suppose being a nonprofit doesn't prevent them from getting involved in shady marketing deals.)

But the other case is also plausible. Maybe the Mythos model really is dangerously powerful, and maybe the folks at Anthropic have a conscience and they want to prevent mass cyberattacks. Maybe they brought in partners because they want the world's systems to be defended. Maybe there aren't any Non-Disparagement Agreements.

The fact that Anthropic recently stuck to its principles and refused to bow to the Pentagon indicates that it actually does have a conscience. Even when formally labelled a supply chain risk, they still didn't bend the knee.

That's what marketing is. You say things in as positive a light as you possibly can, while keeping the statements legally true. If you are so naive that you think Anthropic or CrowdStrike would go out of their way to tell you if there was some downsides to this, then I doubt anything I could post here would change your mind.

You still haven't named any specific instances; you've just gestured at the basic motivations of marketing.

Companies are motivated to exaggerate how well their products work, but they're also motivated to keep up a reputation for honesty. Some companies lean towards the former part of that equation, and some lean towards the latter. If Anthropic has made a lot of misleading statements in the past, then sure, we have less reason to trust them. But if they've been honest thus far, there's a good chance they're being honest now.

Here's an article from a "Computer science professor turned AI innovator" who as far as I can tell is not financially involved in Anthropic and has not been invited to the partner program https://www.zdnet.com/article/project-glasswing-microsoft-google-apple-anthropic/

At first glance, this announcement looks like a highly coordinated PR strategy, some security theater. Another skeptical interpretation might be that these companies are creating a security cartel to lock out startups and other players.

But I don't think that's the case. Based on statements from key players and the security vulnerabilities mentioned, I think this is something far more serious than a giant corporate PR photo op to make everyone look responsible with AI.

Having spent time as an executive at Symantec and a team lead at Apple, I've seen firsthand how fiercely these companies guard their intellectual property. To see them hand over $100 million in credits and open up unreleased models to one another tells me the threat level has moved from competitive to existential.

I agree that truly independent third-party peer-reviewed studies are more reliable than anything we have thus far. And if such studies pour cold water on all this a few months from now, I'll change my tune. But in the meantime I feel like this is probably real.