Bessent Urgently Summons Bank CEOs Over Anthropic’s New AI (2)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned Wall Street leaders to an urgent meeting on concerns that the latest artificial intelligence model from Anthropic PBC will usher in an era of greater cyber risk.

Bessent and Powell assembled the group at Treasury’s headquarters in Washington on Tuesday to make sure banks are aware of possible future risks raised by Anthropic’s Mythos and potential similar models, and are taking precautions to defend their systems, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified citing the private discussions.

Many of the executives were in town already for a meeting of the Financial Services Forum, an advocacy group made up of the biggest lenders. A representative for the Treasury didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Fed declined to comment.

The previously unreported meeting, arranged on short notice, is another sign that regulators consider the possibility of a new breed of cyber attacks as one of the biggest risks facing the financial industry. All the banks summoned to the meeting are classified as systemically important by top regulators, meaning their stability is a priority for the global financial system.

Read More: Why Anthropic Won’t Release Mythos to the Public

Powell’s participation in the meeting signaled that the concern was one of systemic risk, and not tied to the Trump administration’s previous clashes with Anthropic, said some of the people. The Fed, with its network of examiners, is also deeply familiar with banking operations.

“We’re taking every step we can to make sure that everybody is safe from these potential risks, including Anthropic agreeing to hold back the public release of the model until our officials have figured everything out,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said on Fox News Friday in response to a question about the Fed and Treasury’s meeting. “There’s definitely a sense of urgency.”

Other regulators are also taking action. The Bank of Canada and the country’s major banks and financial firms met Friday to discuss cybersecurity risks raised by Mythos, Bloomberg reported Friday. The Bank of England will meet with top bank and insurance executives to discuss how they’re preparing, according to a report from the Telegraph.

Read More: Bank of Canada, Major Lenders Meet on Anthropic AI Cyber Risk

Anthropic’s Mythos is a more powerful system that the AI firm has said is capable of identifying and then exploiting vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser when directed by a user to do so.

Regulators’ caution about the power of the model in hackers’ hands echoes Anthropic’s own prudence. Anthropic has limited the release of it to just a few major technology and finance firms at first. Those companies, which include Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. as well as JPMorgan Chase & Co., are part of “Project Glasswing,” which will work to secure the most important systems before other similar AI models become available.

Jerome Powell

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

Anthropic has said that it has been in discussions prior to its recent release with US officials about Mythos and its “offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.”

In releasing Mythos to a very limited set of companies, Anthropic pointed to several vulnerabilities that the AI system was capable of both identifying and potentially exploiting during testing. None of the examples related specifically to financial institutions, but in one instance, the firm’s security team said it was able to compromise a web browser so that a website set up by a hacker could read data from another website “e.g., the victim’s bank.”

Mythos Preview “fully autonomously discovered” a way of reading information stored in “multiple different web browsers” and then used that ability to find ways to exploit them, according to a post from Anthropic’s security team.

Read More: Anthropic’s Mythos Model Heralds New Era for AI Releases: Q&AI

Anthropic has separately been battling the Trump administration in court. The Pentagon had labeled the company as a supply-chain risk, a designation that Anthropic has opposed. Earlier this week, a federal appeals court declined, at least for now, Anthropic’s request that it put a pause to the Pentagon’s designation.

Chief executive officers summoned to the meeting with the Fed and Treasury include Citigroup Inc.’s Jane Fraser, Morgan Stanley’s Ted Pick, Bank of America Corp.’s Brian Moynihan, Wells Fargo & Co.’s Charlie Scharf, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s David Solomon, said the people. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon was unable to attend, the people said.

Spokespeople for the banks declined to comment. A representative for Anthropic had no immediate comment.

In recent years, regulators have required banks to hold some capital tied to the potential for cyber attacks, as well as other so-called operational risks such as lawsuits and rogue employees. Banks have sometimes chafed at those requirements, given that operational risk is more difficult to measure than the market and credit risks that also factor into banks’ capital levels.

(Updates with Hassett comments in sixth paragraph, Bank of Canada in seventh.)

--With assistance from Katherine Doherty, Yizhu Wang, Shirin Ghaffary, Lydia Beyoud, Nancy Cook and Josh Wingrove.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Todd Gillespie in New York at tgillespie30@bloomberg.net;
Katanga Johnson in Washington at kjohnson655@bloomberg.net;
Hannah Levitt in New York at hlevitt@bloomberg.net;
Sridhar Natarajan in New York at snatarajan15@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Katherine Chiglinsky at kchiglinsky@bloomberg.net

David Scheer, Peter Eichenbaum

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