Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent meeting with bank CEOs this week to warn of cyber risks posed by Anthropic’s latest AI model.

Bessent and Powell brought the group together on Tuesday to inform about the possible risks associated with Anthropic’s Mythos and potential similar models, as well as make sure that banks are implementing appropriate safeguards to protect their systems, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

"Those bankers were in town for meetings ​that day, and it was appropriate (for) the Secretary Bessent to do what he did. He brought them ​over to the Treasury, along with Jay Powell, and went through the cyber risks ⁠to make sure that they were aware of them," White House national economic adviser Kevin Hassett said during an interview with Fox News, according to Reuters.

He added that the Trump administration is working to protect the public from potential risks.

The meeting, which was arranged on short notice, signals concerns among regulators and large banks with increasingly capable AI tools. Anthropic launched its Mythos model this week, but soon announced that it’s too risky to be publicly released.

The company said that Mythos is capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser when instructed.

“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, adding that the eventual goal is to enable users to safely deploy Mythos-class models at scale.

Mythos can "find software vulnerabilities better than all but the most skilled humans,” which could pose significant systemic risk – as signalled by Powell’s own participation in the meeting.

As of now, the tool is limited to 12 launch partners, which include major tech giants like Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Apple, as well as over 40 organizations focused on critical software infrastructure.

The US government has also extended its cybersecurity information-sharing initiative to the crypto sector, offering companies “timely, actionable cybersecurity information…helping them better identify, prevent, and respond to cyber threats targeting their customers and networks."

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