Treasury Department Wants Access to Anthropic’s Mythos

The department’s technology team is hoping to look closer at the artificial intelligence (AI) model to seek out vulnerabilities, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (April 14), citing a source familiar with the situation.

Treasury Chief Information Officer Sam Corcos hopes to get access to the model, which Anthropic has been rolling out to a limited number of institutions, as soon as this week, the source told Bloomberg.

This person added that Corcos had discussed the technology with the Treasury’s cybersecurity team last week and directed staff to be ready for threats from powerful AI systems.

As Bloomberg noted, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last week summoned Wall Street leaders to an urgent meeting amid fears that Mythos will bring about an era of increased cyber threats.

Anthropic has cautioned that the model may be capable of powering cyberattacks if companies don’t test it against their own systems and create defenses.

The Bloomberg report also noted that the government is seeking access to Anthropic despite the Pentagon deeming the company a supply chain risk earlier this year.

That designation came after a dispute with Anthropic over how its AI technology might be used by the military, with the Defense Department giving Anthropic six months to hand over AI services to another provider. Anthropic is contesting the designation in federal court.

Writing about this issue earlier this week, PYMNTS argued that the rise of AI-driven vulnerability discovery may challenge some key assumptions about financial stability, including the idea that cyber risks are secondary to economic factors like liquidity crises.

The challenge facing the financial sector is two-fold, the report added. On one hand, institutions must understand and quantify the threats posed by AI-driven vulnerability discovery. At the same time, they need to adapt their security architectures, processes and governance models to function in an environment where the pace of threat evolution has increased dramatically.

“The involvement of the White House and leading banks signals that this shift is being taken seriously at the highest levels,” that report said. “But awareness is only the first step. The real test will be whether the industry can move quickly enough to harness AI’s defensive potential while mitigating its risks. In the race between attackers and defenders, speed has always mattered. With the advent of frontier AI, speed may become the defining factor.”