White hat, black box: AI’s next chapter
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
The decision of Anthropic, an AI giant, to keep its Mythos model sequestered surely makes for good press. But there seems to be more to it than that—and it might change the whole industry’s approach. Indian politicians are chasing female voters more than ever; we question the means and the outcomes. And next in our World Cup contender-country profiles: Senegal.
Guests and host:
- Alex Hern, AI writer
- Kira Huju, Asia correspondent
- Jon Fasman, senior culture correspondent
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- AI, Anthropic, Mythos
- India, women, politics
- World Cup, Senegal
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:10.3 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm your host, Jason Palmer. |
| 0:15.4 | Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:23.6 | Thank you. a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In India, there's a big political shift underway. |
| 0:28.6 | The country's women are becoming an ever more potent force in the electorate. |
| 0:32.6 | Whether what politicians are doing to win them over is vote-buying or genuinely empowering is not entirely clear. |
| 0:42.6 | And my former co-host and a sports nut John Fasman is leading us up to the World Cup |
| 0:48.2 | by profiling the countries of 10 teams that are in contention. |
| 0:52.1 | This week, it's Senegal. |
| 1:17.3 | Thank you. 10 teams that are in contention. This week, it's Senegal. Normally when someone tells me they've got a new superhuman AI, but I'm not allowed to see it, they're telling tall tales. |
| 1:22.6 | But with Anthropics' new mythos AI system, there's a chance they're telling the truth. |
| 1:27.4 | Alex Hearn is the economist's AI writer. |
| 1:32.0 | It's a superhuman hacker that's so dangerous they can't release it. |
| 1:36.5 | It's forcing skeptics to accept that some of the dangers of AI may come sooner than they expected. |
| 1:42.4 | And it's also making the AI industry reassess its own business model. |
| 1:49.6 | So let's start with this new piece of mind-bending tech. What is Mythos? |
| 1:56.9 | Claude Mythos is the latest AI system from Anthropic, The Makers of Claude. It's, as the name perhaps suggests, bigger and badder than its previous models, haiku, sonnet and opus, |
| 2:01.9 | those are getting larger each time, and mythos is the biggest yet. But unlike those previous |
| 2:06.6 | models, it's not been released. Anthropic went to all the effort of training it, and then as a preview |
| 2:12.6 | version only, gave it to a select group of partners, 11 named groups and 40 smaller organizations. And that's |
| 2:19.1 | because it is, Anthropic says, a tremendously good hacker. You pour money in one end, you get |
... |
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