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US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent summoned the leaders of some of the largest US banks earlier this week to discuss the cyber risk posed by the latest AI model from Anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter.
The meeting was attended by the leaders of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, the people said, who were already in Washington for a meeting of the banking lobby group.
JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon was invited to the conversation with Bessent but could not attend. The meeting, attended by Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell, was first reported by Bloomberg.
The summons from the Treasury secretary underscores the concerns inside the Trump administration over the capabilities of Anthropic’s latest model because of its advanced ability to detect cyber security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors.
Executives have been warning for years of the cyber risks facing the financial system. In his annual letter published this week, Dimon wrote that it “remains one of our biggest risks” and that “AI will almost surely make this risk worse” and would require significant investment for defence.
Anthropic on Tuesday released the model, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, to a select group of partners, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, to give them a “head start on being able to secure vulnerabilities”.
Mythos, which is a “general purpose” model with capabilities beyond cyber security, marked the first time Anthropic had limited the launch of a new model.
“AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities,” Anthropic said in a statement announcing the release.
It added that Mythos had already found thousands of severe vulnerabilities, including in “every major operating system and web browser”, some of which had been undetected for decades.
Anthropic said it has held talks with US government officials about the model’s “offensive and defensive cyber capabilities”.
The limited release of Mythos came after two incidents where data from the start-up leaked online — including documents related to Mythos and the underlying code for its Claude assistant — raising concerns about Anthropic’s security. The company blamed human error for the incidents.
Anthropic declined to comment on the bank CEOs meeting. The Federal Reserve, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley declined to comment. The Treasury department and Citibank did not respond.