NEW YORK — It is telling that Anthropic chose to call its most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model “Mythos.” In ancient Greek, the word denotes an original reality that we can imitate or embody through the stories we tell ourselves and one another. Pliny the Elder tells us that the fifth-century Greek painter Zeuxis rendered grapes so realistically as to fool even the birds. But stories do not only imitate a pre-existing reality. They also engender new realities by expressing what is possible. For example, the revolutionary opening words of the American Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) gave pride of place to individual freedom regardless of class, property ownership, or religious or political belief. Through this mythos, the Founding Fathers laid the foundation for a way of governance conceived in liberty and equality. The frontier AI models embody both kinds of storytelling. On one hand, they imitate past human thinking, responding to user prompts by seeking out relevant patterns from the vast database of previously archived mat