Sam Altman criticizes Anthropic’s fear-based marketing

The ongoing rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic has escalated with a new round of criticism. During a recent appearance on the podcast Core Memory, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called out his competitor’s new cybersecurity model, Mythos. Altman alleged that Anthropic is employing fear-based marketing to make its product sound more impressive than it actually is. The comments highlight the competitive tension between the two artificial intelligence developers as they compete for enterprise clients and public access. The dispute underscores the ongoing industry debate regarding AI safety rhetoric and how companies position their products.

Anthropic announced Mythos earlier this month, choosing to release the cybersecurity model to a small cohort of enterprise customers. In explaining the restricted rollout, the company has claimed that Mythos is too powerful to be released to the public out of concern that cybercriminals will weaponize it. However, critics have characterized this stance, arguing that the rhetoric is overblown. This restricted release strategy has drawn attention to how safety concerns are communicated to the public.

During his podcast appearance, Altman implied that Anthropic’s fear-based marketing serves as a way to keep AI in the hands of a small and exclusive elite. “There are people in the world who, for a long time, have wanted to keep AI in the hands of a smaller group of people,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. He noted that while companies can justify this approach in many different ways, the strategy often relies on hyperbole to sell tools. Altman illustrated this by suggesting it is highly effective marketing to claim to have built a bomb that is about to be dropped on people’s heads, and then offer to sell those same people a bomb shelter for $100 million.

This reliance on scare tactics is not unique to Anthropic. Much of the artificial intelligence industry has leveraged hyperbole to make its tools sound powerful. Ongoing rhetoric about how AI may lead to the end of the world has not originated solely from Luddite doomer activists. Instead, these warnings have also come from the people selling this technology to the public, a group that includes Altman himself.

Why it matters

The clash between OpenAI and Anthropic underscores a deepening industry divide over AI safety rhetoric, where competitive positioning is increasingly framed as a debate over public access versus existential risk.