My thinking is that if it really was super duper then Anthropic could charge eye watering amounts and have willing customers and set up expectations going forward that SOTA costs a lot to use.

That they don’t suggests that really it is only incrementally better than Opus 4.7 and that the market won’t bear a price increase that makes it economical to serve let alone profit from serving.

So the cynical me imagines execs sitting around the table and worrying that releasing it at anywhere close to break even would risk actually hurting the brand instead of setting them up as a premium company, and this at a time just before ipo when they can ill afford that rumour.

So they wonder what to do, and think playing national security card is the obvious way out. It’s incrementally better enough to find bugs that previous sota missed, it doesn’t get used widely so it’s cheap to serve and they get the good publicity without the economic scrutiny?

Making a loss selling to a small number of users using it in a limited way is entirely affordable. Making a loss selling it at scale is correspondingly unaffordable?