By Bo Erickson and Jessica Koscielniak
WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) – The Trump administration and Anthropic’s CEO on Friday discussed working together for the first time since a dispute earlier this year between the Pentagon and the AI firm over how that company’s models should be used.
The meeting between CEO Dario Amodei and White House staff, which took place amid growing fears the AI startup’s latest model will supercharge cyberattacks, suggests the two sides might be on a path to rebuilding trust.
The Trump administration, central bankers across the globe and industries are racing to get up to speed on Anthropic’s new model Mythos and its ability to make complex cyberattacks both easier and quicker to execute.
The banking industry, with its legacy technology systems, is particularly vulnerable. Government officials in at least three countries – the U.S., Canada and Britain – have met with top banking officials to discuss the threats posed by Mythos. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in the meeting with Amodei, Axios reported.
“We discussed opportunities for collaboration, as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology,” the White House said in a statement that described the meeting with Anthropic as “productive and constructive.”
The two sides also talked about balancing innovation and safety. “We look forward to continuing this dialogue and will host similar discussions with other leading AI companies,” the White House statement said.
Anthropic said the meeting was “productive” and discussed how the two “can work together on key shared priorities such as cybersecurity, America’s lead in the AI race, and AI safety.”
Announced on April 7, Mythos is first being deployed to a select group of companies as part of Anthropic’s “Project Glasswing,” a controlled initiative under which the organizations are permitted to use the unreleased Claude Mythos Preview model to search for cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
The model is the company’s “most capable yet for coding and agentic tasks,” the company said in a blog post, referring to the model’s ability to act autonomously.
But its capabilities to code at a high level have given it a potentially unprecedented ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and devise ways to exploit them, experts have said.
That’s a particular problem for banks and other financial institutions, which run technology stacks that integrate state-of-the-art tools with decades-old software, potentially opening a large number of vulnerabilities, according to TJ Marlin, the chief executive of enterprise AI security firm Guardrail Technologies.
DISPUTE WITH TRUMP AND PENTAGON
Long before the launch of Mythos, the U.S. government and the Silicon Valley firm disagreed on how Anthropic’s AI should be used. After months of contentious talks, the Pentagon slapped a formal supply-chain risk designation on Anthropic, sharply limiting use of its technology after the startup refused to remove guardrails against using its AI for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance.
When ordering federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI tools, U.S. President Donald Trump blasted the company on Truth Social, saying “The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War”.
Anthropic sued to block the Pentagon from placing it on a national security blacklist in March.
Asked in Phoenix by reporters about the Anthropic meeting on Friday, Trump said, “I have no idea.”
(Reporting by Bo Erickson and Jessica Koscielniak; Additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw in Phoenix; Writing by Chris Sanders and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Rosalba O’Brien)
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