SED News: Anthropic’s Mythos, Supply Chain Hacks, and the AI Spending Surge

43 snips

May 7, 2026

A deep dive into Anthropic’s controversial Mythos security model and its selective rollout. Tales of recent cloud and supply-chain compromises and lessons in secure-by-default design. A look at massive AI infrastructure spending and how cloud, chips, and model labs are becoming intertwined. Hacker News highlights include AI reviving old projects, compact model-training tricks, and the math behind cheating at Tetris.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Largest Infrastructure Buildout In Tech History

Hyperscalers have poured roughly $650–700B into AI capex, reshaping cloud, chips, and model economics.
Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Microsoft bets link model labs tightly to specific cloud and chip roadmaps.

INSIGHT

Cloud Chip Bets Lock In Model Choices

Vertical integration emerges as models, clouds, and chips entwine: training/inference choices tie labs to cloud chip roadmaps.
Switching underlying infra is hard and costly, so early cloud-chip commitments shape future model performance.

ANECDOTE

Demand For Engineers Has Surged Despite AI Hype

TrueUp data showed 67,000 open engineering roles across 9,000 firms, a doubling since mid‑2023 and 30% up in 2026.
At conferences Gregor met many students asking whether engineering degrees still matter in an AI wave.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.

In this episode, they cover Anthropic’s controversial “Mythos” security model and what it means for vulnerability discovery at scale. They also discuss recent layoffs at Snap and Meta, and how AI investment pressures are reshaping hiring, organizational priorities, and the economics of big tech.

Gregor and Sean then zoom out to examine the massive wave of AI infrastructure spending—hundreds of billions in capex across Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, and what it signals about the future of cloud platforms, model providers, and the engineers who build on top of them. They explore the emerging entanglement between model labs and infrastructure providers, the evolving role of engineers in an AI-native world, and the growing gap between rapid AI adoption and security readiness.

Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including creative uses of AI coding tools to revive abandoned side projects, new approaches to training smaller yet highly capable models, surprising demographic data visualizations, and even the mathematics of “cheating” at Tetris.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post SED News: Anthropic’s Mythos, Supply Chain Hacks, and the AI Spending Surge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.