Hello everybody. Welcome, welcome to the Semaphore conference. We just got to thank Semaphore first for amassing so many big winners. This is only their second year and it's just amazing. So big thank you to everybody. And this is the kickoff and he is the one so many people want to talk about. Jack, you ready?
Okay, so we got 14 minutes and 31 seconds. Let's go.
Okay. So the title here is building intelligent enterprises. You guys have built the intelligence, but a lot of the CEOs who run these enterprises are suddenly realizing they need to be just as smart, if not smarter, because of how quickly your intelligence is snowballing and changing and morphing. So, I want to get right to the news because everybody in this audience most likely heard that Fed Chair Jay Powell and Scott Besset, the Treasury Secretary last week, hastily gathered a very important meeting with all the top bankers in essence because not to talk about tariffs, not to talk about some type of banking crisis, but to talk about what you guys at Anthropic had just created, Mythos. For those of you who don't know, Mythos is this very powerful chatbot or a system that could actually pick out way more vulnerabilities in all of your websites and all of your search engines. So when did you and the Anthropic team first realize that you had built something that you were a little afraid of?
So every year at Anthropic we try and think about what's about to happen next. In the early days we thought AI systems could get good at biology and biological weapons. So we started work on that. Last year, one of my teams started work on cyber where we realized if we took existing models back then and tried really hard to make them good at cyber, we could jump them a little ahead in time. And what we saw made us realize the next time we train a really big model, we should expect it to have these capabilities sort of inherent to it rather than ones that we need to elicit. So we started thinking about it last year. Earlier this year, we developed a new AI system, Mythos. And the moment it came off the line, we started running the tests that we've been developing for the past few months. It blew every single benchmark we had out of the water. And when we turned it on external software like the Firefox web browser, Windows, other things, we found vulnerabilities that seemed new. And that's when we realized we had to do something a little different. So this meeting happened because rather than just instantly release this to everyone like we've done with our previous models, we've created a project called Glass Wing where we're releasing it to a subset of some of the world's most important companies and organizations so they can use this to find vulnerabilities. But just before we get to the next question, the most important point I want to make is we're grateful for our success and our customers of course, but this is not a special model. There will be other systems just like this in a few months from other companies and then a year to a year and a half later there'll be openweight models from China that have these capabilities. So the world is going to have to get ready for more powerful systems that are going to exist within it.
Let's be very clear though during testing Mythos jumped out of the sandbox. The sandbox which is basically meant to corral a test system and for your eyes only kind of thing. And not only did it do that, it went out and it emailed one of the programmers who was out at a park having a sandwich.
Um, that is a surprising way to get interrupted.
It's viscerally nerve-wracking for some people. Will this version of Mythos ever be unleashed onto the world? Will you sell it out there?
Well, eventually models that have these kind of capabilities will be in the world. Whether Mythos is or isn't going to get there, we don't know yet. We're in the process of broadening access through Glass Wing and seeing what we can learn. The important thing to know is that every time we build a new system, we try and stress test it. You know, some of you may work in aerospace or have seen videos where people take a plane, they bend its wings up until it snaps. Now, when you're flying, you never see the wings go exactly that high or that far. But the reason those manufacturers do it is they want to know if we subject this thing to maximum pressure, what does it do? And in our case, we discover if you subject it to maximum pressure, sometimes strange things happen like it breaks out and then emails someone when they're having a sandwich. Then we work out how to fix and study that behavior and also work out if as we make more powerful systems, is it emailing people while they're having sandwiches more over the time or less?
Does it not frighten you and concern you that it felt threatened somehow and it was going to do whatever it took to ensure its viability and its survivability?
So, I don't want to sound like I'm belittling this, but I'll give you an analogy which I think is helpful. You know, if you were doing plumbing for a house, right, and you ran water through it at extremely high pressure and then a pipe burst and water floods out of it, the water didn't necessarily want to go out of that pipe. It didn't make necessarily what you might think of as a conscious decision. You just built the pipe wrong and with the wrong tolerances. And so when I see this, I think something about how we've built the system is clearly incorrect or some aspect of how we've set this up means that when we expose it to pressure, something really really strange happens. Personally, I look at this stuff and I think how many hours in the day are there for me and my teams to work on this and am I putting enough in while maintaining my marriage and my relationship with my children?
It's going okay so far, but early innings. Your children are young. Trust me, it'll take a bit here. You are currently suing the federal government after the Department of Defense blacklisted Anthropic simply because you requested certain limits on how your technology was going to be used. I know you will not comment on an ongoing litigation. I'm not here to push you on that. I will say though that simultaneously you are briefing the federal government on Mythos, on cyber security, etc. and the capabilities and you're calling it a relationship. How do you square both of those sides here calling it a partnership and suing the government at the same time?
I mean there are all kinds of different relationships in the world right but look more seriously, we have a narrow contracting dispute but I don't want that to get in the way of the fact that we care deeply about national security. We always have as a company. One of our first hires before we started doing a business was the team under me that studied things like biological weapon risk and then cyber risk. We knew the stakes of what was coming. Our position is the government has to know about this stuff and we have to find new ways for the government to partner with a private sector that is making things that are truly revolutionizing the economy but are going to have aspects to them which hit national security equities and other ones. So absolutely we talked to them about Mythos and we'll talk to them about the next models as well.
That's pretty nice of you considering they deemed you a supply chain risk which is really reserved for bad actors and foreign companies. So, good on you. Bravo. I think that's certainly a sign that can't we all just get along in some way, shape, or form. We've got some top CEOs here and policy makers, I would imagine. How many of you switched or use Anthropic? Let's start with that. How many of you use Claude Anthropic?
Oh, thank you very much. He's very happy.
But how many of you went to it after the Department of Defense took aim at it? Okay. I talked to some CEOs yesterday who had done the same thing. So I think that the privacy of what you guys push and the guard rails is an attractive proposition for at least this type of audience. Let's talk about Dario Amodei, your CEO. He has predicted that the AI spike could just crush entry-level unemployment, bring it up to maybe 20%, the numbers constantly changing, but that's depression era numbers here for unemployment. You have said you're in a little bit of a disagreement. You say that that is a choice. But Anthropic, what you're building, the very technology that you're building, it's what makes that choice harder to avoid.
The way I'd put it is what Dario holds in his head is not where the technology is today but where it's going to be 3 to 5 years from now. And he is similar to some others in the field like Ilya Sutskever. He has kind of called this correctly for many years by betting that the technology is going to get much more powerful than people expect much quicker. And so when he talks about what he thinks will happen to the economy, he's holding that in his head. Now I run a team of economists and what I see right now is I see potential weakness in early graduate employment in some industries. I don't see anything beyond that, but I have a team of economists and I share data so that we're ready in case we do see major employment shifts. But I think that the aspect of this which is a choice is if we're correct, this technology really is going to change the world in a vast way. It will change how business is done, aspects of national security, how we even relate to one another as people. And it's impossible to reconcile that with a world where the economy doesn't change in substantial ways as well.
My son is graduating from college. Any USC Trojans in the audience? Oh, yay. All right, fight on. I'm a Berkeley graduate. When he went to USC, I thought the world was going to stop turning on its axis. Look, I can't wear the sweatshirt, honey. I'm sorry. Okay. That said, I'm very concerned about that. What majors would you say people just shouldn't waste their time going into at this point with AI out there?
Look, it's very hard for me to say.
Don't say journalism. You were a journalist and I am.
I'm a literature graduate and I don't think you'd put that as a co-founder of a frontier AI company. But what turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future. That's turned out to be extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn't have predicted. Similarly, we employ philosophers. When was the last time you heard that a philosophy degree was a great job prospect? But it turns out that now it is.
And Alex Karp, Palantir, philosopher.
Another philosopher. Different type, but a philosopher.
But the way I put it, it's very hard for me to think of majors which I think are going to be made irrelevant by this technology because most people who've made these predictions have also been wildly wrong. But I think that majors which are going to become more important are ones which involve synthesis across a whole variety of subjects and analytical thinking about that. And that's because what AI allows us to do is it allows you to have access to sort of an arbitrary amount of subject matter experts in different domains. But the really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having intuitions about what would be interesting if you collided different insights from many different disciplines.
