Who Gets the Tools
Anthropic has begun letting Mythos users share cybersecurity threats with others who may face similar vulnerabilities, while the European Union has been unsuccessfully petitioning Anthropic to grant access to its Mythos model for cybersecurity purposes. The arrangement lays out the familiar hierarchy in plain sight: a private AI lab decides who gets access, while governments and institutions line up asking for permission.
The Atlantic said AI has ascended to the role of main character and noted that, when Donald Trump traveled to Beijing for a historic summit last week, AI was one of the central topics of his discussions with Xi Jinping. The article said Trump brought along some of the United States’ most powerful AI executives, including Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. A continent away, the European Union was still trying and failing to get Anthropic to open the gate to its advanced cybersecurity model, Mythos.
The Gatekeepers and the Locked Door
Anthropic announced Mythos in early April as a model with the ability to rapidly find and exploit bugs throughout the internet. Anthropic and OpenAI have not released these cybersecurity models to the public out of fear they will be used by criminals or terrorists, while companies and government bodies alike are hungering for access so they can use the tools to patch bugs. The result is a familiar setup: the most powerful tools stay behind corporate walls, while everyone else is told to wait for the right people to decide what safety looks like.
The Atlantic said AI labs have become major geopolitical actors in their own right. That is not a metaphor so much as a description of how power now moves: private firms with advanced models sit at the same table as presidents, state officials, and corporate executives, while ordinary people are left to live with the consequences of decisions made far above them.
State Power, Corporate Power, Same Old Script
The Trump administration is reportedly weighing the possibility of testing or even licensing the most powerful AI models before their public release, moves the White House once called “dangerous” and “onerous.” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is said to be spearheading Trump’s AI policy and has written a rare post on X vowing to keep Americans safe from AI cyberattacks by ensuring “the best and safest tech is deployed rapidly to defeat any and all threats.”
A White House official told The Atlantic that “any policy announcement will come directly from the President.” The line is pure vertical control: policy flows from the top, announced from the top, and justified as protection for everyone below. Meanwhile, the apparatus keeps expanding its reach over technologies that are already concentrated in the hands of a few companies.
Dozens of members of Congress have signed letters to the White House on AI regulation this month alone. The legislative route is there, as always, presented as the civilized answer. But the facts in the article show the real center of gravity remains with the labs, the White House, and the executives who travel with presidents while the public is told to trust the process.
What the Public Gets
Anthropic’s move to let Mythos users share cybersecurity threats with others who may face similar vulnerabilities is the only directly described sharing mechanism in the story. It is a limited opening inside a system still defined by restriction, petitioning, and controlled access. The European Union wants the model. Companies want the model. Government bodies want the model. The model stays behind the wall unless the gatekeepers decide otherwise.
That is the shape of the whole story: AI labs acting as geopolitical actors, state officials seeking licensing power, Congress writing letters, and the public being asked to accept that the best and safest tech will be deployed rapidly by the people already holding the keys.