The ban on Mythos is entirely performative.

There has been a lot of debate surrounding the recent ban on Mythos, but I think people are missing the bigger issue: **this looks more like security theater than a meaningful intervention.** Mythos was already released publicly. The model's existence, capabilities, and limitations were known specifically because its developers chose to make them visible. Regulators were able to examine it, researchers could test it, and the public could discuss it. The obvious problem is that regulators can only act on what they can see. No one outside a handful of companies knows what the most advanced internal AI systems actually look like. The largest AI developers operate enormous research programs, spend billions on compute, and routinely train models that are never publicly released. Whether those systems are more capable than Mythos is almost beside the point—the public has no way to evaluate them because they remain private. **That creates a perverse incentive.** If public disclosure leads to scrutiny, restrictions, or outright bans, while private development faces far less visibility, companies are effectively being taught that secrecy is safer than transparency. The organizations that openly reveal what they are building become the easiest targets for regulation, while those that keep their work behind closed doors avoid much of the attention. The result is that regulation may end up selecting for opacity rather than safety. If the goal is to understand and manage advanced AI systems, regulators should want more visibility into development, not less. Policies that primarily affect publicly disclosed models risk pushing future breakthroughs further into private labs, where neither researchers nor the public can independently assess what is happening. The question isn't whether Mythos should or shouldn't have been banned. The question is whether banning a model that was already visible to everyone actually improves safety—or whether it simply encourages the next generation of AI systems to remain hidden until they're impossible to scrutinize. **TL;DR:** If regulators punish public disclosure more than private development, they're creating incentives for secrecy. That doesn't slow AI progress; it just makes it harder for anyone outside the companies building it to know what's happening.