The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, summoned major American bank chiefs to a meeting in Washington this week amid concerns over the cyber risks posed by Anthropic’s latest AI model, according to reports.
Jerome Powell, chair of the Rederal Reserve, was said to have been among those gathered at the Treasury headquarters for the meeting after the release of the Claude Mythos AI model that Anthropic says poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks.
A recent leak of Claude’s code prompted the startup to publish a blogpost at the beginning of the month saying that AI models had surpassed “all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities”, adding: “The fallout – for economies, public safety, and national security – could be severe.”
This week’s meeting was reportedly called while bank bosses were already in Washington for a lobby group gathering, with a guest list focused on heads of so-called systemically important banks – meaning regulators believe that a major disruption to their operations, or their potential collapse, would put financial stability at risk.
Those in attendance included the Goldman Sachs chief executive, David Solomon, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Morgan Stanley’s Ted Pick and the Wells Fargo boss Charlie Scharf, according to Bloomberg, which first reported details of the meeting. JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon was invited but unable to attend.
In an annual letter to shareholders, published this week, Dimon warned that cybersecurity “remains one of our biggest risks” and that “AI will almost surely make this risk worse”.
Anthropic has said that its Mythos model, yet to be released, has exposed thousands of vulnerabilities in software and popular applications, prompting it to limit the release of the new model to a small clutch of businesses, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft.
This is the first time Anthropic has restricted the release of a product. The networking companies Cisco and Broadcom have also gained access, along with the Linux Foundation, which promotes the free, open-source Linux computer operating system.
The news comes amid concerns that hackers could end up using such tools for figuring out passwords or cracking encryption that is intended to keep data safe. The company said the oldest of the vulnerabilities uncovered by Mythos were up to 27 years old, none of which is believed to have been noticed by their creators or tech monitors before being identified by the AI mode.
The meeting comes weeks after the US government designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk, allegations that Anthropic is fighting in court.
The Federal Reserve, Anthropic and the US banks declined requests for comment from Bloomberg. The Treasury did not respond to the news outlet’s request for comment.
