Anthropic: A PR Buzz Champion
April 9, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
The first big PR play that called my attention to Anthropic and Claude was the, “Gee, we don’t kill people.” A a person who has worked for government agencies engaged in what government agencies do, I am not around too many professionals who say, “We don’t kill people.” As a former low-level worker at a blue chip consulting firm, I learned that one sold projects to government agencies without tossing in, “Hey, you know, we don’t want our information, services, and tools to — like, you know, well— kill people. Not a recommended career path.
Great news! Robots at a terminal did not elicit a warning about prompts that violate Venice.ai’s decency guardrails. Okay, good enough.
However, Anthropic is a BAIT outfit (big AI tech, if you are not familiar with my writing that some AI detectors think is actually output by an AI system, not a dinobaby in rural Kentucky). I noted writes up like “Anthropic Labeled a Supply Chain Risk, Banned from Federal Government Contracts.” The announcement did what US government decisions usually do. The story generated buzz around Anthropic as a BAIT outfit as a firm with morals, ethics, and principles. Who knew? A Silicon Valley BAIT outfit that presumes to tell a client, “Dude, like, you know, well, you can’t use our software to do bad things.”
Flash forward to a second PR event. I learned today (April 8, 2026) that the company has another “we’re the ethical AI outfit” campaign underway. “Anthropic Says Its Most Powerful AI Cyber Model Is Too Dangerous to Release Publicly — So It Built Project Glasswing” reports:
Anthropic on Tuesday announced Project Glasswing, a sweeping cybersecurity initiative that pairs an unreleased frontier AI model — Claude Mythos Preview — with a coalition of twelve major technology and finance companies in an effort to find and patch software vulnerabilities across the world’s most critical infrastructure before adversaries can exploit them.
Okay, Glasswing, a metaphor for fragility or a fragile see-through insect, is the do-good approach to responsible AI. Furthermore, Anthropic used its super wonderful BAIT innovation to “land” some companies who in theory share Anthropic’s commitment to doing good. The cited write up states:
The launch partners include Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks. Anthropic says it has also extended access to more than 40 additional organizations that build or maintain critical software, and is committing up to $100 million in usage credits for Claude Mythos Preview across the effort, along with $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations.
What’s Glasswing (doesn’t that evoke images of fragility when the objective is, according to Nicholas Taleb the author of Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder) going to do? The Venture Beat article explains:
At the center of Project Glasswing sits Claude Mythos Preview, a general-purpose frontier model that Anthropic says has already identified thousands of high-severity zero-day vulnerabilities — meaning flaws previously unknown to software developers — in every major operating system and every major web browser, along with a range of other critical software.
Now the “transparent” PR part:
“We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available due to its cybersecurity capabilities,” Newton Cheng, Frontier Red Team Cyber Lead at Anthropic, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “However, given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe.”
Okay, but aren’t some of these partners the very outfits who sell system that are, in fact, security risks? And a couple of these Anthropic Glasswing fliers are going to make their software more secure when other AI technology will attempt to find ways to snooker users, breach defenses, and spoof systems?
But the point is not the cat-and-mouse cyber security game. The real objective is to build a warm, amber aura of a bright sunny technology around today’s AI. The approach taken by Anthropic is definitely less expensive than buying advertising in the Wall Street Journal, attending selected cyber security conferences, and running TikTok-type videos.
But the big benefit is getting the message: “We are responsible” to the public and to the “partners” who are now going to have an opportunity to learn what other wonderful functionality Claude has. Will this lead to sales? My view is, “Yep, that’s the under publicized objective.”
The Venture Beat article adds:
Finding thousands of zero-days at once sounds impressive. Actually handling the output responsibly is a logistical nightmare — and one of the sharpest criticisms that security researchers have raised about AI-driven vulnerability discovery. Flooding open-source maintainers, many of whom are unpaid volunteers, with an avalanche of critical bug reports could easily do more harm than good. Cheng told VentureBeat that Anthropic has built a triage pipeline specifically to manage this problem. “We triage every bug that we find and then send the highest severity bugs to professional human triagers we have contracted to assist in our disclosure process by manually validating every bug report before we send it out to ensure that we send only high-quality reports to maintainers,” he said. That pipeline is designed to prevent exactly the scenario that maintainers fear most: an automated firehose of unverified reports. “We do not submit large volumes of findings to a single project without first reaching out in an effort to agree on a pace the maintainer can sustain,” Cheng added.
Anthropic’s humans and smart software have anticipated issues. There is, however, one tiny assertion that I struggle to accept. As the system looks for issues, Anthropic’s royal we enters the picture, and I quote:
We triage every bug that we find …
Anthropic then doubles down on the categorical affirmative, allegedly saying:
by manually validating every bug report….
A high school debater might ask, “If you do not know the scope of the issues or the volume, how can you state Anthropic will “manually validate every bug we find”? And, then ask, “How can a human who presumably coded with errors be relied upon to identify an error and remediate it if the software is from a system not widely supported like a legacy Hitachi mainframe or older IBM MVS/TSO system?”
I am not sure sophisticated wizards from BAIT (big AI tech) companies have qualms about categorical affirmatives, but I do. My concern is piqued when there is a precedent for creating “we are the good guys” PR. OpenAI, for example, provides its software to certain government entities known to take kinetic action. But not the good guys like Anthropic.
Before ending my dinobaby blog post with the trivial high school debater questions, I want to ask, “What BAIT outfit suffered a loss of some of its software.” If I believe the information in “What Anthropic’s Leak Means For The Coming Wave Of ‘Dark Code’,” Anthropic, the security conscious good guy, had the problem. This Forbes’ article notes:
The leak, triggered by a human error, exposed 500,000 lines of source code of Anthropic’s star product Claude Code.
If a company cannot protect its own valuable asset, how can I be expected to believe the statements which are categorical affirmative. By this example, Anthropic has demonstrated it has security problems. So “every” and “cyber security” and “bug finding.” Yeah. Got it. How do glass wings handle stress, variable temperature, and content marketing thrown at them? What if there is an AI bug zapper tuned for those with glass wings and PR that positions one AI company as the bestest in the integrity field? Zzzzapp.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2026
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