Trump Administration Blacklists Anthropic—Now Tells Banks to Use Its AI
April 13, 2026 – 7:52 pm
In short: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell are urging Wall Street’s biggest banks to test Anthropic’s Mythos AI model for cybersecurity vulnerabilities, even as the Pentagon fights Anthropic in court after branding it a supply chain risk for refusing to remove safety guardrails on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are all reportedly testing the model. Mythos, which found thousands of zero-day flaws across major operating systems and browsers, is being distributed through a restricted programme called Project Glasswing to roughly 50 organisations. UK regulators are also scrambling to assess the risks.
Contradictory Recommendation
The Trump administration is quietly encouraging America’s largest banks to test the same AI company’s technology it has spent two months trying to destroy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned executives from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley this week and urged them to use Anthropic’s new Mythos model to detect cybersecurity vulnerabilities in their systems, according to Bloomberg.
The Controversial AI Model
The recommendation is remarkable for its contradiction. Anthropic is currently fighting the Department of Defense in federal court after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company a “supply chain risk,” a label that bars it from military contracts and directs defense contractors to stop using its technology. The designation came after Anthropic refused to remove two safety restrictions from its AI models: no use in fully autonomous weapons, and no deployment for mass surveillance of American citizens.
Now, two of the administration’s most senior economic officials are telling Wall Street to adopt the very product the Pentagon has tried to blacklist.
What Mythos Does
Claude Mythos Preview is a frontier model that Anthropic did not explicitly train for cybersecurity. The vulnerability-finding capability emerged as what the company describes as a downstream consequence of general improvements in code reasoning and autonomous operation. During testing, Mythos identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities, flaws previously unknown to software developers, across every major operating system and web browser.
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