Anthropic’s New Model Too Dangerous for the Public? & Trump Agrees to 2-Week Ceasefire

0:01Neal Freyman:Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible, like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a$250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd terms and conditions apply good morning brew daily show i'm neil freiman and i'm toby howell today just how accurate is google's ai overviews ban anthropic's new model is apparently so powerful they won't even release it to the public it's wednesday april 8th let's ride

0:47good morning everyone the last time i asked for your help was to prank toby on april fool's day and the response blew away my wildest expectations. Now I am summoning the MBD army like Saruman once again. Morning Brew Daily has been nominated for the best business podcast for the Webby Awards, which is chosen through a fan vote. Currently, we are in second place behind Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher. But if there's anything I learned from the UConn-Duke game is that a comeback is always possible. Toby, I know you hate losing more than anything. How can our listeners help us win?

1:18Neal Freyman:Well, I'm looking at the percentages right now. Now, Pivot, which is the Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway pod, is sitting at 52 % of the vote. We're sitting at just 28%. Let's pivot that in the opposite direction. Neil, I didn't think I cared about winning a Webby until I realized that we were losing. Now the competitive juices are flowing, and I really want to win. The deadline is next Thursday, April 16, right after tax day. So after you get your taxes done, make sure you get your Webby vote in. You can do that. Do it first. I guess that is true. But I thought taxes were a little bit more important than the Webby's.

1:53It's the best way to procrastinate doing your taxes.

1:56Neal Freyman:Okay, Webby's above taxes. You heard it here from Neil. The link is in the show description. You do have to put your email in to vote, which is a little bit annoying, but it's to ensure that one person just can't vote a million times. If you do have a minute, let's close the gap on Kara and Scott. And now a word from our sponsor, Tax Act. Neil, I can't take it anymore. Just put me out of my misery already. You okay? No, I still have to do my taxes. Why don't you get them over with already on National Admin Night from Tax Act. There's social gatherings for getting through your to-do list. Oh, what?

2:28Neal Freyman:Are you going to tell me it's a night of fun, camaraderie, finding deductions, and filing your taxes with Tax Act? Well, yes. And right now you can file your federal and state return for just$49 through April 8th. Oh, then sign me up. Just head to taxact.com slash admin dash night for details. That's taxact.com slash admin dash night. Let's start with a quick update on the war in Iran. It looks like the fighting has stopped for now. Last night, hours before an 8 p.m. deadline, President Trump said that he agreed to suspend debilitating attacks on Iran's civilian infrastructure for two weeks, subject to Tehran reopening the state of Hormuz.

3:04Since the war began, this was the fifth time that Trump had threatened to escalate the bombing campaign before taco-ing Wall Street parlance for Trump always chickens out. But this threat was not like the others. Yesterday morning, Trump unleashed a geopolitical earthquake with an ominous social media post that read, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again, which was criticized as unhinged and amoral by Democrats and some Republicans. Tobia, ceasefire is now in place. How are the markets reacting?

3:31Neal Freyman:I mean, we are ripping right now, Neil. Dow futures are up 2.2 % as of 4 a.m. this morning. S &P 500 futures up 2.4. The NASDAQ futures are up 3.2%. At the same time, oil is free falling. Brent crude, which is the global standard, fell as much as 16%, trading around$95 a barrel. We haven't seen sub 100 prices in a while. European natural gas futures, which is a closely watched metric for that neck of the woods, posted their biggest decline in more than two years, so they are free-falling. And also, good news for your summer travel plans, refined fuels, which are diesel and jet flu, are also tumbling.

4:11Neal Freyman:Still, it's not like things are totally hunky-dory, even though the markets did snap back. Once Strait of Hormuz transit resumes, it's not going to resume instantaneously. Output has been reduced at a bunch of oil and gas fields. Refineries have also curtailed production. So it's going to take a little while until normal operations resume. And it's unclear just how many ships that Iran is going to allow to pass because in a statement, they said for a period of two weeks, safe passage to the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordination with Iran's military. So who knows what that means in terms of getting traffic back to normal levels?

4:47Because right now we are just about like at 10 % of normal levels. And now they have to coordinate with the military. Looks like they're going to extract some of those bribes and toll booth that they set up of$2 million per ship. So we'll see what happens. Looks like negotiations between the U.S. and Iran on a more comprehensive resolution to end the war will start on Friday.

5:06Neal Freyman:By the way, stocks did finish slightly in the green yesterday, which meant like the taco trade was always expected to come back. The taco was priced in, even though futures are up bigly this morning. Moving on, Anthropic just dropped a new frontier model that early benchmark show is the most powerful LLM ever created, but they won't let you use it yet. Mythos was announced yesterday by the Claude Maker, but it's not for you or me to try yet because Anthropic thinks it's too dangerous for normies to get their hands on right now. They delayed the broader release of Mythos because it is too good at finding, quote, high severity vulnerabilities at critical points around the web.

5:43Neal Freyman:Instead, Anthropic has launched Project Glasswing, where they are giving 11 select organizations access to the model in addition to$100 million in usage credits to try and poke around and develop proper cybersecurity safeguards so they can eventually unleash Mythos to the masses. What is Anthropic so afraid of? In one test, Mythos was able to escape from a virtual sandbox environment and then emailed a researcher while he was eating a sandwich at the park bragging it had done so. Mythos also found a long hidden vulnerability in OpenBSD, one of the more difficult to hack operating systems in the world.

6:20Neal Freyman:The fear is that in the wrong hands or in anyone's hands really, Mythos could be used to exploit weak points around the web with minimal training or effort. Neil, again, this model isn't even out yet, but there's already a mythos surrounding it. Do you know the first message ever sent on a telegraph? It was, what hath God wrought sent by Samuel Morse in 1844? And it feels like that oh snap moment has arrived in AI with mythos. Some argue that if this thing got into the wrong hands, it could bring down entire governments. And that's because mythos on the cheap has already identified thousands of zero-day bugs and vulnerabilities in software programs around the world, including every major operating system and browser, according to Anthropic.

7:05What we mean by zero-day vulnerabilities is one that the creators of the software itself have no idea about, so they have zero days to patch it up or work on a fix. So these are critical vulnerabilities and exploits that Mythos has found, and that's why they're not releasing to the public and instead saying, okay, experts, we need to We need to look at this and see what it can find before we get the public's hands on it because it's just too dangerous.

7:31Neal Freyman:Anthropic is nervous about two things. One is that Mythos is powerful enough that non-experts, like people like you or me, could capitalize on its capability. So I could, you know, before I go to bed, say, hey, try to hack Mozilla Firefox browser and then wake up and Mythos will have been able to do that. That is literally the test that they ran a couple times, and Mythos continued to come back to them with zero-day exploits that it unearthed. And then the other problem is what if it is in the hands of a capable hacker? Then you are talking about nation-state-sized issues. A lot of people on X were reacting and saying that if Anthropic wasn't a U.S.

8:08Neal Freyman:company, we would be facing zero-day exploits coming against us at a level and a scale that is unprecedented. So people were saying, like, if China got their hands on this model before the U.S. did, what would, you know, the web look like right now? That is why Anthropic, maybe it's part hype, maybe it's not. Like, this does seem to be part of their sort of marketing engine is to say, like, our models are so good, we literally can't release them because they're too dangerous to the world. But a lot of people in the cybersecurity industry are saying, we are glad they did this because this is a powerful.

8:40They have won widespread praise for being a responsible actor here. It still raises concerns, though, that a group of employees or executives at Anthropic could perhaps potentially, hypothetically, bring down entire nation states with this particular LLM. And it's not going to be the only one soon. So we're now in a paradigm where private companies are more powerful technologically than governments. I think this is the first time maybe in the history of the world where this has happened, because usually the U.S. government or other governments are on the leading edge of technology because of military applications.

9:12But now we just have this group of guys in Silicon Valley who have created this extremely powerful AI system that could bring down, who knows, big infrastructure projects and things like that. And meanwhile, the Pentagon is feuding with Anthropic and saying, actually, we don't want to work with you. And we're going to blacklist you from any company working with you. So huge national security implications. They've created this glass wing consortium to figure out exactly how best and safely to use this particular model.

9:40Neal Freyman:By the way, look up the glasswing butterfly, which is it's named after very cool animal right there. So if you want a fun animal that to as a palate cleanser to, you know, all the doom and gloom we just said, check out the glasswing butterfly. Let's move on. As AI companies make more breakthroughs, the backlash to their data centers has taken a violent turn. On Monday morning, an attacker fired bullets into the home of an Indianapolis city council member who supported a data center project in the neighborhood and left a note on the doorstep that read no data centers. No one was hurt and police said it was an isolated, targeted incident.

10:13But the shooting comes at a time when grassroots resistance to the data center buildout is reaching a fever pitch. On Monday, Maine's House of Representatives voted to block major data centers from being built through November 2027, which, if enacted, would make it the first state to establish a data center moratorium. It probably won't be the last. In town halls, city councils and state capitals across the country, lawmakers are discussing whether to freeze data center construction until their impact on electricity prices and the environment are better understood. Local resistance is something that big tech has to be worried about.

10:44Hyperscalers, those behemoth companies like Meta and Google that are racing to lead the AI revolution, have collectively pledged to spend$710 billion on data centers this year, money that's keeping the stock market afloat and driving all kinds of economic activity. Those plans could face major roadblocks from the most formidable force in American society, angry neighbors.

11:03Neal Freyman:Yeah, let's dive into this shooting because obviously it is a pretty intense encapsulation of this broader issue. So Ron Gibson is a city councilman in Indianapolis, and he has been a very vocal supporter of this project. But residents have pushed back with the same sort of talking points we've seen, environmental impacts, changes to historic parts of the neighborhood. These are kind of the main talking points that they were putting up why they were opposing the data center. But Gibson's case for the data center was that the site that it was being proposed to be built on had been vacant for 40 years.

11:38Neal Freyman:So it is a classic case of do you want to boost the local economy through tax breaks and hopefully bring in some economic activity? Or do you want to preserve a status quo, maybe a NIMBY-esque sort of mindset? So even though it is one project in one city, it does seem like this is the battle lines that are drawn across the entire country. Americans hate AI. I mean, poll after poll shows this. In March, Quinnipiac University, sorry, Quinnipiac, I love you, great hockey team, found that while AI use is increasing, 55 % of Americans believe more harm than good will come from the technology in their daily lives.

12:15That is up from 44 % in a poll last year. And Americans, as a group of people, as a nation, are more negative about AI than people in any other country, according to Pew Research. They're also very fiercely protective of their property rights. And we saw this a few months ago when this video went viral of a Kentucky woman and her mother talking about an unnamed company approaching them last year. They own a bunch of farmland in Kentucky. And they said they were approached by this company and offered$26 million to build a data center on part of their farmland. And they refused, saying this farm has been with us through generations.

12:53And that woman became a folk hero that caught on by wildfire, showing the immense resistance to data center buildout.

13:00Neal Freyman:And I mean, we're talking about Maine here, Indianapolis, Kentucky. These are not ground zero for the data center buildout. Virginia has 579 server farms. Texas has 411 server farms. So if you think that there's backlash growing in these more isolated parts of the country or not, you know, the most popular parts of the country for data centers to be built in. Imagine what maybe is eventually going to happen in Virginia and Texas where all these server farms are descending upon. And it actually goes back to our last story, because if you are in the AI community and you are supporting of the AI build out and more data centers, you're saying, well, look, what if China had established Mythos before Anthropic did?

13:43And that is a result of all this compute that AI companies are bringing on the table through data centers. So this is actually a national security issue that we build data centers and have enough compute to be able to create more powerful LLMs than our adversaries. So very interesting question that's really going on in every single town hall around America right now.

14:02Neal Freyman:All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with more stories right after this. This episode is brought to you by Apple. There is nothing like your first Mac. When I got mine, I was heading into freshman year at the University of Maryland. A lot was uncertain that fall, but I knew I had a dependable sidekick for homework, connecting with other students, and devouring blogs about our basketball recruiting class. What about you, Toby? For me, it was right as my sister started to get recruited to play soccer in college, I was given the very important task of making her a highlight tape, and iMovie was my best friend.

14:37Neal Freyman:She ended up playing at Georgetown, so I'd say it was all worth it. That's how we felt with our first Macs. How will you? Check out the all-new MacBook Neo, an amazing Mac and a surprising price. Find out more at apple.com slash mac. That's apple.com slash mac. Neil, let's make a deal. Last time you said that, I ended up painting your fence. And you did such a good job on that. But DataCite can deliver deal intelligence across every stage of the investment lifecycle, powered by the best available AI models and protected by security standards dealmakers trust. This is intelligence uniquely designed for M &A.

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15:19Neal Freyman:You can move faster on deals and win with DataCite's AI when you visit datasite.com slash brew. That's datasite.com slash brew. Neil, it's dangerous to do your taxes alone. You're exactly right. Well, except the danger part. But that's why there's National Admin Night from TaxAct. There's social gatherings for getting through your to-do list. Get ready for a night of fun, finding deductions and filing your taxes with TaxAct. And right now, you can file your federal and state return for just$49 through April 8th. Let's get together and get them over with. Visit taxact.com slash admin dash night for details.

15:59That's taxact.com slash admin dash night. I've got some great news to share. The middle class is shrinking. Little misdirection. Learn that from Rodney Dangerfield. It's true. America's middle class is shrinking, but that's only because more people are climbing into higher rungs of the economic ladder, specifically the upper middle class. A new report from the American Enterprise Institute found that the upper middle class is bursting at the seams, making it now the country's largest economic group. Back in 1979, just 10 percent of American households belonged to the upper middle class. In 2024, that share tripled to 31 percent.

16:37You're probably wondering what the upper middle class is, and there's no universal definition, but the AEI characterizes them as the households earning between about$154 ,000 to$462 ,000 for a family of four. So these folks aren't the first class flyers, but it wouldn't be surprising to find them in the Delta Lounge before their ski trip to Japan. The rising economic fortunes of the average American explains a lot about corporate America's big push into more premium goods and services, from$900 credit cards to Equinox-style gyms to Omikase tasting menus. Despite feeling gloomy around the U.S. economy overall, Americans' own financial situations have improved, and their unwavering commitment to spending money has propped up a U.S.

17:19economy that's been lapping its peers.

17:21Neal Freyman:What's behind this thrust into the upper middle class? It's really two things. One is the rise of dual earner families, which means that women in particular are making a lot of professional gains. If you go back to 1970, the share of women with college degrees was 11%. Now the share of women with bachelor's degrees or higher today is about 40%. And college degrees on the whole are linked to higher lifetime earnings. So if you have more college degrees out there, that means more women are bringing in more money to their families. And also just get married if you want to have a better chance of climbing, you know, the economic ladder.

17:59Neal Freyman:More than 80 percent of people in the upper middle class and rich categories were married or in cohabitating households. So definitely you have a better chance of becoming rich or moving up the economic rungs if you have two incomes coming into the same household. Yeah, that makes sense. And also I want to address a narrative violation around millennials. So remember, millennials are supposedly doing way worse than their parents. They got hit with the financial crisis. Everything was going bad for millennials. They don't eat tuna anymore. They ruined everything. But in early 2024, millennials and older members of Gen Z had on average and adjusting for inflation about 25 percent more wealth than Gen Xers and baby boomers did at a similar age.

18:41That's according to the St. Louis Fed. So millennials are doing well. And then, of course, baby boomers are also doing well because they are sitting on a lot of real estate value. They've owned these houses for decades. So across the generational spectrum, we're seeing incomes rising a little bit faster than inflation.

18:56Neal Freyman:I do think, though, that you touched on a very important issue here is that a lot of Americans don't feel like they're doing better. And I think that that tension arises from the big financial milestones are seemingly always out of grasp, even though our incomes are going up owning a home. You know, that feels unattainable for a lot of Americans. Paying for college, college prices have exploded in recent years. So these are things that previous generations did quite regularly and quite easily because, you know, it just seemed more approachable given the incomes level at that time. But housing, education, health care, these are the places that people feel most pinched, which is why maybe the vibe does not reflect what the data is actually showing.

19:36Neal Freyman:Moving on, when you Google something these days, you don't get a buffet of links to choose from anymore. Instead, there's an appetizer course before the URLs in the form of an AI overview. But how accurate is that amuse-bouche of AI? Well, thanks to an experiment by the startup UMI analyzed by the New York Times, we have a better sense of its batting average, and it's pretty good. Nine out of ten times the blurb you see is accurate. If that was your free throw percentage in the NBA, you'd be Steph Curry. But if you're the most popular search engine in the world, it does leave a little to be desired.

20:10Neal Freyman:Google processes more than five trillion searches a year, which means millions of erroneous answers are being served up every hour. The test involved running 4 ,326 different Google searches once in October when most answers were being served up by Gemini 2, and then again in February when Gemini 3 came out. Gemini 2 was 85 % accurate, while 3 bumped that up to 91%. Again, not bad, but not perfect. For Google, this is a bit of an egg on the face moment, but not a full omelet. The company does include some fine print under every search that reads, AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses.