Bill Maher says that with the latest episode of Real Time, he considered what would have been a first for the 23-year-old HBO program—delivering an op-ed “without any jokes.”
The takedown in question aired this past Friday, April 17, and was pegged to AI developer Anthropic’s recent acknowledgement that the latest iteration of its Claude LLM, Mythos, is so adept at identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s too dangerous to release.
At issue is the fact that while Mythos’ capabilities are to ostensibly be used in the name of thwarting hacks, it’s easy to extrapolate that the LLM itself could initiate cyberhacks—of most anything including power grids and the military.
Maher went in hard on the harrowing development, including that fact that Anthropic will, in the name of helping find and patch vulnerabilities, release Mythos to”40 big companies” like Apple, Amazon and J.P. Morgan—”you know, the good guys,” the Real Time host quipped.
After the episode aired, Maher shared on X how he considered changing up his “New Rule” formula this time, in order to underline, italic and boldface the warning he was proffering. “I thought about doing this without any jokes, something I’ve never done here in 23 years,” he wrote, “to impress upon people how much different I feel this issue is from any I have ever covered.”
Instead, as sampled above, there were a few comedic asides, including cracks about American Airlines’ wi-fi and how AI has yet to cure cancer but it can generate an entirely inappropriate image of SpongeBob SquarePants with Stephen Hawking.
Questioning the larger AI agenda that operates with few guardrails, Maher asked, “What was the plan? To just create an all-powerful super-intelligence that can outthink us, and then… see what happens? Like getting the cat high?”
He also clocked that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Geoffrey “The Godfather of AI” Hinton—aka “the people who run it i.e. the people who run the world”—are “five guys who between them couldn’t correctly read a social cue.
“I wouldn’t let these guys around a mixed drink let alone my personal data,” he added.
Watch the full AI segment below:
I thought about doing this without any jokes, something I've never done here in 23 years, to impress upon people how much different I feel this issue is from any I have ever covered. pic.twitter.com/wTuI1V2PlB
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) April 18, 2026
It’s been a long, long time since Bunghole Bill Maher said anything funny!