No insider info, but just wanted to mention that pricing signals things too. If Mythos is only servable at $X*Y dollars and isn’t Y times better than $X of compute at another provider, it’s quite possible that affects the IPO price negatively versus the halo of having the worlds most expensive model that is “too powerful to release” unpriced and unbenchmarked.
I think that most people at Anthropic are true believers from my interactions with them so I don’t believe this theory anecdotally. The simplest explanation is that it really is taking a while to gain confidence they won’t be used for a spree of bad cyber attacks. Knowing how long it takes institutions to fix security issues when filed by humans I would be more suprised if this wasn’t the case.
But I would forgive anyone who did think it was deliberately sandbagged; given the staggering sums at play, true believers might believe the ends justify the means to a little “marketing” like this.