April 9 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent meeting with bank CEOs this week to warn of cyber risks posed by Anthropic's latest AI model, two sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
Anthropic launched the powerful Mythos model earlier this week but stopped short of a broad release, citing concerns it could expose previously unknown cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
The company said the model was capable of identifying and exploiting weaknesses across "every major operating system and every major web browser".
The meeting, held at the Treasury Department in Washington on Tuesday, was aimed at ensuring banks are aware of the potential risks posed by Mythos and similar models, and are taking steps to defend their systems, one of the sources said.
The invitation came while most CEOs of the largest U.S. banks were already in Washington to attend other meetings, one of the sources said.
Access to Mythos will be limited to about 40 technology companies, including Microsoft and Google, and Anthropic has been in ongoing talks with the U.S. government about the model's capabilities, the startup has said.
Bloomberg News, which first reported the matter on Thursday, said the CEOs of Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs were present. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon was unable to join, one of the sources told Reuters.
Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve declined to comment. The Treasury, lenders and Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.
(Reporting by Saeed Azhar in New York, Carlos Méndez in Mexico City; Writing by Chris Thomas; Editing by Sumana Nandy)
