TheBadPlaceundefined | Vance, Bessent questioned tech giants on AI security before Anthropic's Mythos release
Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent convened a private conference call with several top technology leaders—including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Palo Alto Networks chief Nikesh Arora, and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz—to discuss the security posture of large‑language‑model AI systems and how the government should respond if those models are weaponized. The discussion, held a week before Anthropic released its new Mythos model, centered on safeguarding AI deployments, preventing malicious exploitation, and establishing protocols for rapid response to cyber‑attack scenarios involving AI.
Anthropic’s Mythos, unveiled on Tuesday, is being rolled out to a limited cohort of companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike while the firm evaluates safeguards to stop hackers from misusing the technology. Company officials told CNBC that they have been in contact with White House staff for weeks, offering to support “the government’s own testing and evaluation of the technology.” The model’s dual‑use capabilities—offensive and defensive cyber applications—prompted senior officials across the U.S. government to receive a pre‑release briefing on its full capabilities.
The concerns raised by Vance and Bessent reverberated further up the policy chain: Treasury Secretary Bessent, alongside Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, summoned the heads of the nation’s largest banks for a surprise meeting to assess the potential threat posed by Mythos. At the same time, Anthropic continues to fight a Department of Defense supply‑chain risk designation, with a federal appeals court denying a request to block the blacklisting even as a San Francisco judge previously granted a preliminary injunction. While the company remains barred from DoD contracts, it can still work with other federal agencies as the legal battles unfold.
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