May 11, 2026

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THE MYTHOS MENACE

IN an old fable from the Arabian Nights, a poor fisherman frees a genie from captivity only to discover the creature may turn on its liberator. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, appears determined not to risk a similar fate. Or so goes the modern fable. His company chose not to publicly release `Mythos', the newest and most powerful model in the Claude family of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, because it was considered too potent for open deployment. Anthropic itself described the model's capabilities as "substantially beyond those of any model we have previously trained"That alone would have made headlines. But what set off alarm bells globally was what Mythos was built to do. Brewed in the cauldron of agentic AI, especially around coding tasks, it's said to have hyper-evolved into a Frankensteinian monster of sorts, with a transcendent eye for software vulnerabilities, including unknown "zero-day" flaws or bugs unknown to its developer but exploitable by attackers. In short, a capability that could be

NOW, NARA SHAKTI

FIVE DAYS BEFORE APRIL 20-- HIS 76TH BIRTHDAY--Chandrababu Naidu, four-time chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and head of the Telugu Desam Party, elevated his only child, TDP national general secretary Nara Lokesh, to the post of working president, effectively anointing him as the undisputed successor of the partyThe formal announcement may have been made only now, but the 43-year-old Stanford MBA graduate has been the de facto head of party affairs--and to a large extent the Andhra Pradesh administration as a cabinet minister in charge of the HRD, IT, Electronics & Communication and Real-time Governance (RTG) portfolios--for about two years now. Or since the Naidu-led NDA combine wrested power back from another regional satrap, Jagan Mohan Reddy of the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), in the 2024 assembly election. The TDP, with 135 MLAs, excluding of allies Jana Sena Party (JSP) and the BJP, in the 175-seat AP assembly, is in a commanding position in the state. The party has a prominent place in New Delhi, too, with its 16 Lok Sabha MPs forming a crucial support base for the Narendra Modiled NDA government at the CentreSince early last year, a seemingly coordinated chorus calling for the creation of another deputy chief minister's post for Lokesh--currently held by JSP chief Pawan Kalyan--had been growing louder. Lokesh's visits to New Delhi and his interactions with BJP leaders and ministers have also become frequent of late. In fact, Modi endearingly calls him "Bhai Lokesh", and had even hosted a dinner for him, his wife Brahmani and son Devansh at his 7, Lok Kalyan Marg, residence in May 2025. The two have been meet- ing regularly since, the most recent being this April, when Lokesh called on the PM to thank him for the passage of the bill designating Amaravati as the sole, permanent capital of APBack home, no nominated appointment, top bureaucratic posting, transfer or major business deal is said to happen without the heir apparent's involvement or consent. It's no surprise, then, that everyone--from politicians and bureaucrats to businessmen and celebrities--wants to be in Lokesh's good books and firmly out of his `red book', the one he often invokes, said to contain a list of alleged wrong-doers from the days of the YSRCP regimeLEANER AND MEANER Lokesh was in a very different place just three years ago. The TDP had its back to the wall, and Jagan's YSRCP seemed set for another term in office. A debut from Mangalagiri in 2019 had ended in defeat, attracting sneering allusions of being a Pappu, even fatshaming. Party leaders are in awe of the