Federal Reserve Lacked Access to AI Model Posing Cybersecurity Threat

In April, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department convened an extraordinary meeting with the CEOs of the nation's top banks. Officials rang the alarm bell about an advanced new artificial intelligence model that could pose an unprecedented cybersecurity threat to the nation's top financial institutions.

Anthropic, the company behind the AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, said the offering excelled at identifying weaknesses and security vulnerabilities within software. The company released it to a select group of banks and other institutions as part of a cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing.

For at least three months afterward, the Fed itself didn't have access to Mythos, leaving arguably the most systemically important global financial institution vulnerable, even as other institutions began to patch their weaknesses.

The Fed was still trying to get access to Mythos as of July 15. It isn't clear if the central bank has since gained access to the model.

Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The Fed declined to comment for this article.

The meeting in April happened under the previous leader of the Fed, Jerome Powell, who convened bank CEOs alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as CNBC reported earlier. But in little-noticed congressional testimony last week, Powell's successor, Chairman Kevin Warsh, told the Senate he was still working to secure access to Mythos and other cutting-edge AI models.

"We are not the deciders as to who has access, but I have not been shy in sharing my views with authorities across the government about the vulnerabilities, and have been asking for access not just for the Federal Reserve but for other institutions to a whole range of these new artificial intelligence models so that they can protect themselves," Warsh told Sen. Jack Reed, D.-R.I., in response to questions about Mythos.

Warsh clarified that there were other models the Fed needed access to as well.

"I wouldn't want to just isolate Mythos, though," Warsh said. "As these new models find their way more broadly, our banking system and frankly, the Federal Reserve needs to do all we can to patch any vulnerabilities that we have."

Warsh has embraced the adoption of AI in his brief time at the Fed, calling it a transformational technology.

It isn't clear the work to address vulnerabilities can begin without access to Mythos.

Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos Preview and Project Glasswing in early April.

The company said roughly 50 organizations had access to the model at the time, but it named only a handful, including the bank JPMorgan Chase , and tech titans such as Amazon , Apple and Google . Anthropic said it had also been in "ongoing discussions with U.S. government officials" about the model, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Center for AI Standards and Innovation.

Anthropic expanded access to Project Glasswing in June, adding more than 150 organizations to the initiative across 15 countries. Daniel Newman, CEO of research firm the Futurum Group, said he was surprised to hear the Fed was not included.

"You would think that the financial institution that sort of drives all the policy for the rest of the financial institutions would be front and center of at least having a chance to evaluate the new technology," he told CNBC on Tuesday.

Mythos' rollout has sparked both intrigue and confusion in recent months, particularly as Anthropic's fraught relationship with the Trump administration caused complications.

In June, Anthropic said it had to disable access to Mythos 5, an updated version of the model, and Fable 5, a version of Mythos that it released more broadly, in order to comply with an export control directive from the federal government that cited "national security authorities."

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick granted the company permission to restore access to Mythos to a select group of "trusted partners," according to a letter viewed by CNBC. The export controls were later lifted entirely.

The Trump administration has been taking a much more active role in AI regulation since President Donald Trump signed an AI executive order in June. But questions remain about who is calling the shots on AI policy behind the scenes, and the scrambling at the Fed — which Trump chose Warsh to lead — is another sign of chaos.

Chris Fall, head of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, resigned from his role as director just three months after he was picked for the job by the Trump administration, CNBC confirmed on Monday. Venture capitalist David Sacks previously held the position of White House AI and crypto czar, but he stepped down from that role in March.

Pressure is building.

Chinese open-weight models are gaining steam against leading offerings from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, sparking concerns from tech executives and government officials about the durability of the U.S. lead in the AI race. Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, released a model called Kimi K3 earlier this month that outperforms those companies across some industry benchmarks.

Sacks said in a post on X on Friday that Kimi K3's performance is "concerning," and that "America is tying itself in knots."

"This is how you lose the AI race," he wrote. "The rest of the world won't play by our rules if we bog ourselves down."

Futurum's Newman said the Fed is "certainly is going to play catch up" since it hasn't had access to the cutting-edge models that other agencies have.

"Every day, every week, whether it's China's innovation or U.S. innovation, technology leaders inside of large institutions are facing a constant barrage of net innovation," he said.