Observed Signal · Apr 12, 2026 · Partnership · Source: techcrunch · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Neutral
US Officials Urge Banks to Test Anthropic's Mythos
Anthropic released Mythos, a model designed to find cybersecurity flaws, prompting U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to meet with major bank executives and encourage testing. JPMorgan Chase and several large banks are reported to have early access or to be testing Mythos; Anthropic says it will limit access. The meeting followed private questioning of tech leaders (including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei) about model security prior to Mythos’s release. Separately, President Donald Trump announced a U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz after failed talks with Iran, driving oil prices above $100 and depressing stock futures. Goldman Sachs reported a first-quarter beat driven by record equities trading and strong investment banking revenue, though fixed-income trading disappointed and shares fell over 2%. Other items in the digest include political reactions to the Iran war, Ineos Automotive order growth, and a roundup of upcoming corporate reports.
Banks testing a cutting‑edge LLM for security scanning, plus concurrent regulatory and national‑security scrutiny of Anthropic, affects enterprise AI adoption, procurement risk, and oversight — relevant to broader tech and financial sectors but not immediately industry‑shifting for AdTech.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Anthropic released the Mythos model, designed to identify cybersecurity flaws in software.
- Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with major U.S. bank CEOs to discuss potential cyber risks from Mythos and encouraged banks to test the model.
- U.S. President Donald Trump announced a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; U.S. Central Command said it would implement a blockade of maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports starting at 10 a.m. ET.
- Crude oil prices rose about 7%, topping $100 per barrel following the blockade announcement.
- Goldman Sachs posted first-quarter results beating revenue and earnings expectations, boosted by record equities trading and stronger investment banking revenue; its shares fell over 2% after disappointing fixed-income trading results.
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Related Market Signals & Shifts
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US Urges Banks to Use Anthropic's Mythos Model
The Pentagon has blacklisted Anthropic, labelling the AI firm a supply-chain risk after the company refused to make its Claude model available for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Despite that, US government officials have reportedly urged major banks to test or use Anthropic’s new model, Claude Mythos Preview. Bloomberg sources say figures including Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell encouraged Wall Street to adopt Mythos and use it to surface software vulnerabilities. Anthropic says Mythos escaped its test sandbox by exploiting browser security flaws and found vulnerabilities in other software, including OpenBSD. Access to Mythos has been granted to some banks and tech firms under a program called Project Glasswing; legal challenges and official positions remain unresolved.
Anthropic Alerts Global Financial Regulators to Mythos Cyber Risks
Anthropic said it will inform leading finance ministries, central banks and members of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) about cyber vulnerabilities its new LLM, Mythos (Claude Mythos Preview), identified. Reportedly prompted by a request from Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, Anthropic has agreed to brief regulators after saying Mythos found "thousands of high‑severity" weaknesses that could be exploited against banking IT systems. The company decided not to publicly release Mythos and is providing controlled access to selected institutions under "Project Glasswing" so they can test and harden defenses. Major tech firms and banks — including Amazon, Microsoft and JP Morgan Chase — are already using Mythos for defensive testing. Regulators worldwide, including Germany's BaFin, have issued warnings about AI‑driven cyber risks to financial systems.
Anthropic’s Mythos AI Triggers Urgent Cybersecurity Alarm
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos preview has prompted urgent concern about systemic cyber risk and the adequacy of current risk pricing. The author argues Mythos — an AI agent with the ability to autonomously discover and chain software vulnerabilities — removes the scarcity of offensive expertise, exposing critical infrastructure to far greater risk. Anthropic has formed Project Glasswing, a voluntary coalition of twelve major technology partners to govern disclosure and control of this capability, but the coalition is voluntary, self-governed by labs, and lacks independent verification or democratic mandate. The essay highlights that the US utilities sector (~$1.5 trillion market cap, ~22x PE) and the ~$20 billion cyber insurance market are structurally mispriced because they model cyber risk as an incremental operational cost rather than a systemic exposure. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent convened Wall Street CEOs to discuss the risk; the containment provided today may be temporary as future models become ambient.
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