Trump administration met with tech giants before Mythos release
According to information obtained by CNBC, Vice President J.D. Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asked leading technology CEOs last week about the security of artificial intelligence models and how to respond to cyber attacks before Anthropic released its new Mythos model.
Two people familiar with the issue, who did not want their names to be disclosed because the event was private, said that the meeting took place over the phone.
One of the people is Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Elon Musk of xAI, GoogleSundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, MicrosoftSatya Nadella, CrowdStrikeGeorge Kurtz and Palo Alto NetworksNikesh Arora also participated.
Tech CEOs met to discuss the security status of large language models and secure deployment, according to the person. Authorities also discussed how to respond if models were scaled in favor of attackers, they added.
An Anthropic official declined to comment on the meeting but told CNBC on Friday that the company has been in contact with senior officials on cybersecurity in recent weeks and stands ready to support “the government’s own testing and evaluation of the technology.”
“Prior to any external announcement, Anthropic briefed senior officials across the U.S. government on the full capabilities of Mythos Preview, including both offensive and defensive cyber applications,” the official said. “It was a priority from the beginning to bring the government into the loop early on about what the model can do, where the risks are and how we manage them.”
OpenAI and CrowdStrike declined to comment on the meeting. The White House and other companies did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Anthropic rolled out its Mythos AI model to a limited group of companies on Tuesday as it evaluates ways to prevent hackers from using it. AppleGoogle, Microsoft, NvidiaPalo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike were among the initial launch partners.
Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell this week called for a surprise meeting with the heads of the largest U.S. banks to address the potential threat from Mythos, signaling that the Trump administration is growing more concerned about advanced cyber tools.
It was also a sign that Anthropic remains part of the debate over artificial intelligence in the White House as President Donald Trump seeks to isolate the startup’s Claude platform from federal agencies.
Anthropic’s legal challenge to the Department of Defense’s definition of supply chain risk is still playing out in court following two opposing rulings in different parts of the country.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected the company’s request to temporarily block the blacklisting, weeks after a federal judge in San Francisco granted Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction in another legal challenge.
By opposing rulings, Anthropic was barred from Department of Defense contracts but can continue to work with other federal agencies while the lawsuits proceed.
— CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this article.
