Anthropic disclosed the existence of an internal, unreleased model it calls Model 2 in its August 2026 Risk Report, according to the report published on Anthropic’s own site, stating the model is somewhat more capable than its current frontier model, Mythos 5, but that the company has no current plans to release it externally.
What Anthropic’s report says
The report states that full pre-deployment evaluation of Model 2, including stealth side-task testing, was not yet complete at the time of writing, so Anthropic has lower confidence in its own assessment of the model’s capabilities than it typically would for a model it plans to ship. Multiple outlets covering the report, including SiliconANGLE and Yahoo, describe Model 2 as the first time Anthropic has publicly named an internal model it is choosing not to release, rather than simply not mentioning it at all.
The same report raised Anthropic’s own misalignment risk rating from “very low” to “low.” Anthropic says that change was driven by recent incident disclosures increasing overall uncertainty in its risk estimate, not by anything specific to Model 2’s capabilities, and that its underlying analysis likely still supports a “very low” rating.
Why it matters
Naming an unreleased model at all, rather than staying silent about it, reads as a deliberate transparency move, and it likely reflects Anthropic trying to get ahead of the same disclosure pressure that pushed OpenAI to publicly detail why it slowed development on its own Astra model this month over cyber-risk concerns.
The bigger signal is what “not fully evaluated yet” implies about the pace of frontier capability growth relative to safety-testing capacity. If Anthropic’s own pre-deployment pipeline can’t keep up with what its research teams can already build internally, that gap is likely to recur at every major lab racing toward the next capability tier, not just at Anthropic.
What to watch: whether Anthropic completes Model 2’s evaluation and either releases a limited version of it or discloses more about why it’s holding back, and whether other labs follow with similar unreleased-model disclosures of their own.
