Apr 12, 2026
Something serious enough to pull the heads of America's biggest banks into a room with the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chair on short notice happened recently — and it wasn't about interest rates or the Iran war.
On April 7, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell convened an unannounced emergency meeting at Treasury headquarters in Washington with the CEOs of the country's most "systemically important" financial institutions, according to Bloomberg (1). The subject: an AI model called Mythos, built by Anthropic, and the potential for it to fundamentally transform and destabilize cybersecurity across the global financial system.
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In the room were Citigroup's Jane Fraser, Morgan Stanley's Ted Pick, Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, Wells Fargo's Charlie Scharf and Goldman Sachs's David Solomon, Bloomberg reports (2). JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon was unable to attend.
All the banks represented are classified (3) as globally systemically important, meaning a breach of any one of them could send shockwaves through the international financial system.
Anthropic's Mythos and how it's different
Mythos is Anthropic's most powerful AI model to date, released April 7 to a tightly controlled group (4) of technology and finance firms rather than the general public.
While it wasn't designed specifically for hacking, its advanced coding and reasoning capabilities have given it something far more alarming: the ability (5) to find and exploit software vulnerabilities that human security researchers missed for decades.
According to Anthropic's security team (6), Mythos has already identified thousands of previously unknown, aka "zero-day," vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser.
Among the discoveries: a flaw in OpenBSD — widely regarded (7) as one of the most secure operating systems available — that had gone undetected for 27 years, and a bug in the video processor FFmpeg that survived five million automated security tests without being caught, per Quartz (8).
What makes Mythos especially worrying to regulators is not just that it can find these flaws, but that it can link multiple vulnerabilities together autonomously to construct working exploits (9).
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"We've regularly seen it chain vulnerabilities together," Logan Graham, offensive cyber research lead at Anthropic, told NBC News (10). "The degree of its autonomy and sort of long-range-ness, the ability to put multiple things together, I think, is a particular thing about this model."
Anthropic noted (11) that none of these cyber capabilities were specifically trained into Mythos, but that they surfaced as a byproduct of advances in reasoning, coding and autonomy.
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Why banks are in the crosshairs and what it means for Americans
Regulators' alarm is specifically about what happens if a tool like Mythos ends up in the wrong hands, or when a competing lab builds something similar without the same safety guardrails.
The Bloomberg-reported meeting was arranged to ensure (12) banks understand they may soon be defending their systems against AI-powered attackers that can find exploits faster than any human security team could patch them.
This matters to everyday people because the summoned banks hold trillions in deposits, process payments, manage mortgages and facilitate retirement accounts for hundreds of millions of Americans.
A successful large-scale cyberattack on even one of them, enabled by a tool like Mythos, could disrupt access to funds, compromise account data or trigger a broader loss of confidence in the financial system.
What Anthropic is doing about it
Rather than releasing Mythos publicly, Anthropic launched (13) Project Glasswing — an initiative that gives a select group of technology and finance companies access to the model specifically to find and fix vulnerabilities before bad actors can exploit them.
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Launch partners include (14) Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Nvidia and JPMorgan. Another 40-some critical software organizations have model access to scan and secure systems.
Anthropic says (15) it's "committing up to $100 million in usage credits" and "$4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations" as part of the effort.
The logic, as Newton Cheng, frontier red team cyber lead at Anthropic, told VentureBeat (16), "Frontier AI capabilities are likely to advance substantially over just the next few months," meaning similar tools will eventually reach hostile actors regardless.
The goal of Project Glasswing is to give defenders a head start.
For the average bank customer, the immediate takeaway is that the people responsible for protecting their money are taking this seriously enough to hold emergency meetings. Whether that preparation proves adequate is the question no one in Washington can yet answer.
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
Bloomberg (1),(2),(3),(12); Fortune (4); Anthropic Red Team (5),(6),(11); Wikipedia (7); Quartz (8); Help Net Security (9); NBC News (10); Anthropic (13),(14),(15); VentureBeat (16)
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With a writing and editing career spanning over 13 years, Emma creates and refines content across a broad spectrum of industries, including personal finance, lifestyle, travel, health & wellness, real estate, beauty & fitness and B2B/SaaS/tech. Her versatility comes through contributions to high-profile clients like Moneywise, Healthline, Narcity and Bob Vila, producing content that informs and engages, along with helping book authors tell their stories.
