Sources: a week before Mythos release, JD Vance and Scott Bessent questioned Amodei, Altman, and others about AI model security and responding to cyber attacks

The call

It has been reported that last week Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent convened a private, phone-based meeting with top tech leaders to press them on the security of large language models and how government and industry might respond if those models were used as cyber weapons. Participants allegedly included Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and security executives from CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. Short notice. High stakes. The central question: what happens if these models scale in favor of attackers?

Anthropic and the Mythos rollout

Anthropic rolled out its Mythos model to a limited set of launch partners days later, and the company says it briefed senior U.S. officials on the model’s offensive and defensive cyber capabilities prior to any external release. Anthropic told reporters it has been in touch with the White House about cybersecurity and offered to support the government’s testing and evaluation. The company also said it prioritized bringing “government into the loop early” — not exactly burying its head in the sand.

Why it matters

The flurry of meetings — which also included a separate surprise call this week led by Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with major bank CEOs — signals an administration taking the threat seriously and tech firms suddenly back in the room where policy happens. It’s also playing out against Anthropic’s messy legal fight over a DOD supply-chain designation: one federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in San Francisco, while an appeals court denied a temporary block in another circuit, leaving the startup in limbo for Defense contracts. Will policymakers and industry stitch together sensible guardrails before a clever adversary finds the loophole? The urgency feels real — and the next few weeks could be telling.

Sources: cnbc.com