Was AI called by Cthulhu? Anthropic’s new platform is straight from Lovecraft

Perhaps Anthropic’s marketing department reads more horror fiction than it lets on. Last month, when the company unveiled Claude Mythos, its most powerful AI model, it included the now-customary boasts. The system, the company declared, can identify and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities — hidden flaws unknown to the developers — in software at a level competitive with the best human security teams. Mythos would not be released to the public. Instead, through a program called Project Glasswing, it would be made available to some 40 carefully selected entities, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Nvidia. The rest of us would be denied access, for our own protection.

Within hours of the announcement, a small cell of unauthorized users had accessed the model anyway, apparently by guessing where it was stored on Anthropic’s servers, exploiting credentials provided by a third-party contractor, and leveraging knowledge gleaned from a prior breach of the AI training startup Mercor. One veteran cybersecurity executive observed that if a private Discord forum could obtain Mythos this easily, China surely already had it. Amid the growing hysteria, OpenAI boss Sam Altman, ever jealous of his rival’s promotional efforts, described Anthropic’s announcement as “fear-based marketing.” Not to be outdone, Altman’s firm just this week unveiled GPT-5.5-Cyber to compete with Mythos. Commentators have lined up to debate whether these technologies are truly life-altering or merely an unusually slick piece of corporate theater. 

But the question worth pausing over is the name. Anthropic could have called this thing anything: a Roman numeral, a managerial flourish, an animal mascot. Instead, the firm reached into the literary subconscious of the West and produced Mythos. That word has, in English at least, one dominant resonance: the Cthulhu Mythos, the interconnected universe of cosmic horror tales bequeathed to us by H.P. Lovecraft and developed by his circle. The PR team at Anthropic may not have intended the reference, or it may have been a playful nod to the “shoggoth” meme on social media used to represent large language models, or LLMs. It does not matter. Some signals declare themselves whether or not they were meant to.

Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, RI, to a mother who would die in an asylum and a father who had preceded her there, and grew up sickly and depressive amid his grandfather’s old books. He was ill-suited to ordinary work and spent much of his adulthood in poverty, selling stories to pulp magazines for pennies. In so doing, he founded a genre, cosmic horror, and wrote in such a violet prose style that his admirers have spent 90 years apologizing for it. What gives the work its peculiar charge is that the horror was aimed, with varying degrees of self-awareness, at the world he himself was being slowly displaced from: the post-WASP America of immigration and industry, whose social and material complexities his reactionary mind could not tolerate. The result was a revulsion so potent and profound, it served as the basis for an art form. 

The animating drama of Lovecraft’s fiction wasn’t about the cosmic entities themselves — Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, eons-old monsters at the center of his dark universe — but about how human beings respond to their existence, including, in many cases, by seeking to summon them. In the famous opening of “The Call of Cthulhu” (published in 1928), the writer warned that the piecing together of dissociated knowledge would one day open up “such terrifying vistas of reality” that humanity would “either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Either madness, or flight. Those were the only options he granted ordinary consciousness when confronted with what lay beyond the borders of its placid Eden of ignorance.

It is hard not to read those lines now and feel that Lovecraft had, in his deeply neurotic and misanthropic ways, anticipated the cultural condition of the early 2020s. The piecing together of dissociated knowledge is, quite literally, the technical description of what LLMs do. This uncanny, “black-box” nature is precisely what led to the invocation of the shoggoth creature as the memetic mascot for these platforms: shoggoths, in the Lovecraft Mythos, are amorphous blobs of immense intelligence initially harnessed as slaves by other cosmic entities, known as the Elder Things, only to turn on their masters, wreaking havoc. 

Faced with real-world shoggoths, — AI systems capable of dismantling the digital architectures on which their economic and military order rests — Western elites have either fallen into cultish madness or sought escape, exactly as Lovecraft intuited. 

The ongoing alignment between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley AI maximalists, represented by the likes of Marc Andreesen, has resulted in a laissez-faire approach meant to accelerate the technology at any cost; this madness for the machine goes beyond the New Right, however, and is paralleled by the techno-utopianism of the old trans-Atlantic liberal set, exemplified by the still influential former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has gone all in on advocating AI saturation for health care and public services. Meanwhile, less organized but no less impassioned voices are recoiling from the machines, giving rise to scattered opposition movements championed at times by everyone from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, to former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, the Georgia populist. Not unlike Lovecraft himself, they seem to wish to roll back the realities of the age and return to a more tranquil time. But so far, all the momentum has been with the acolytes of AI ascendancy, as “dark Satanic data centers,” the monumental pillars of the new messianic faith, are being constructed across the world.

This is where it pays to attend to what Lovecraft actually depicted, rather than to the campy reductions through which his work is often presented. The cultists in his stories — those who devote themselves to awakening the cosmic entities — are more than mindless fanatics; they are the ones who learned the truth and embraced it, finding not horror, but positive ecstasy and enlightenment. Take The Shadow over Innsmouth, the 1931 novella in which the protagonist sets out to investigate a New England town before progressively shedding his humanity under the influence of the Deep Ones and coming to affirm his descent as positive destiny: “I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.” The cultists worship at fires in the swamps; they chant in unspeakable tongues; they perform ceremonies designed to hasten the coming of the cosmic entities. Their madness is, to use the apropos term, of an “agentic” kind. They have dissolved themselves into something they perceive as infinitely greater, and they welcome the dissolution. Is there a better description of contemporary Silicon Valley? 

Indeed, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has done us the courtesy of writing his own theology, which hints at a similarly cultic sense of history unfolding toward eschatological outcomes. “Machines of Loving Grace,” his October 2024 manifesto, takes its title from a 1967 Richard Brautigan poem in which machines of “loving grace” watch over a pacified humanity restored to its mammal brothers and sisters. The companion piece, last January’s “The Adolescence of Technology,” sketches the corresponding hell: a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” arriving by 2027, posing what Amodei concedes might “the single most serious national-security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” There is little practical room accorded to human morality or meaning-making, only a choice between technologically fixed visions of salvation or damnation, with the prophet as the only guide between them. This is the structure of every theologically literate cult in history, including the ones Lovecraft drew with such cold accuracy. 

The metaphor of “adolescence” is the giveaway: a rite of passage is, by definition, something one must undergo, that one cannot refuse. Smuggled inside the liturgy, whether of Amodei or of Lovecraft, is the conclusion these apocalyptic movements wish to deliver to the rest of humanity: that we have no real option to step back, only to navigate under priestly supervision. Refusing the gods altogether is ruled out before the conversation begins. That is what separates the cultist from the investigator, no matter how carefully the cultist has read his Lovecraft.

This typology helps explain the otherwise puzzling spectacle of the past month: the way that the panic wrought by Mythos was accompanied by the offer to help tame, regulate, and interface with the godlike intelligence from the people who brought it into being. Amodei was summoned to the White House to meet with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, even as Anthropic is suing the Pentagon for designating it a “supply-chain risk.” Asked about the meeting on a runway in Phoenix, Trump replied, “Who?” before claiming he had no idea Amodei had been there. The National Security Agency, according to Axios, is using Mythos despite the official Pentagon ban. Treasury has requested access. Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have convened the heads of America’s biggest banks for emergency consultations. The Bank of England has intensified its AI risk-testing. 

Behind these individually small bureaucratic events lies a single dynamic that none of the participants name: the incumbents in the financial system, the intelligence apparatus, and the regulatory state are all afraid. Not in the way they were afraid of social media or smartphones or even cryptocurrency. They are afraid in the older, more elemental sense that Lovecraft identified as the foundation of all genuine emotion: the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind, he wrote, is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown — nay, what cannot be known.

Yet this is, unexpectedly, a cause for measured hope. In the past, I’ve argued in these pages that the failure of Western elites to discipline Silicon Valley has been, fundamentally, a moral and intellectual failure, rather than a structural one. The old patrician class abdicated; the techno-libertarian bros filled the vacuum; the cultists rose to the commanding heights and turned their peculiar post-human (or even anti-human) beliefs into the reigning orthodoxy. What no policy prescription has yet figured out is how to restore the lost equilibrium; how to produce, through institutional means alone, a generation of statesmen sober enough to hold the line against cultists whose stated ambitions include their own civilizational annihilation.

But there is one mechanism more reliable than virtue in producing disciplined behavior, and that is fear. This was the great unspoken truth of nuclear deterrence. The peculiar equilibrium of the Cold War — Mutually Assured Destruction, as it was eventually formalized — was not produced by international goodwill, by the United Nations, by ecumenical councils of conscience. It was produced by the capacity of a small number of men in Washington and Moscow to imagine, in vivid and visceral terms, the atomic destruction of everything they had built. Kennedy and Khrushchev, on the brink of catastrophe in October 1962, were not disciplined by ideology, but by terror. The ego is brought to heel not by higher principles, but by lower and more fundamental ones, when the stakes are sufficiently high. 

The Mythos AI belongs to this category. Like the bomb, and like the Great Old Ones in their fictional register, it is a power of such magnitude that it can produce only one of two responses: the delirium of the worshiper, or the disciplined sobriety of the man who understands he is staring at something that will consume him along with everything else if he tries to ride it. The cultists of Silicon Valley have made their choice. But the powers that be — the corporate boards, the central bankers, the security services, and the chief executives whose empires are constructed atop digital architectures that Mythos can pick apart at machine speed — have every material reason to choose the other path. Not out of altruism, nor any belated commitment to the public interest. But because, like Lovecraft and the fading heirs of Anglo-America a century ago, they fear losing what’s theirs.

Raw self-interest, when the self in question controls the financial plumbing of the world, can produce something functionally equivalent to responsibility. And to a transnational elite that has long conceded it, that is no small thing. 

Lovecraft was darker than this. His investigators almost never escape. They go insane. This is the alternative: the cultist’s path, and that is no path at all. In the short story “The Temple,” Lovecraft’s doomed narrator gasps: “If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!” This is, as a counsel for living, exactly backwards. The men who can remain sane to the hideous end are the only ones who matter. They are the ones who held the world together during the long balance of terror, when wiser men feared they could not. The question is whether their successors — the heirs to a political culture corroded for 30 years by the very technologies whose culmination Mythos now embodies — can perform the same feat. The answer will determine whether the AI age retains values rooted in the human character or yields to chthonic horrors worthy of Lovecraft’s literary nightmares. 

Mythos has awakened, but Cthulhu still lies dreaming, for now.

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