Analysis
New CNBC reporting reveals an awkward gap at the center of Washington's response to advanced AI cyber risk: the Federal Reserve warned the CEOs of the nation's top banks in April about unprecedented cybersecurity threats from Anthropic's Mythos model, while the Fed itself still lacked direct access to the tool as of mid-July -- months after issuing the warning.
The original April meeting, convened jointly by the Fed and Treasury, was unusually direct: officials reportedly believe Mythos demonstrated an unprecedented ability to identify previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in software and methods to exploit them, with concern serious enough that officials discussed scenarios involving Mythos debilitating Fortune 100 companies, infiltrating national defense systems, or contributing to major internet outages if misused by bad actors.
The response escalated into formal export controls: in June, Anthropic disabled access to Mythos 5 and its more broadly released sibling Fable 5 to comply with a federal directive citing national security authorities. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick subsequently granted Anthropic permission to restore access for a select group of "trusted partners," and the export controls were eventually lifted entirely -- a sequence that shows the government moved from alarm to restriction to partial and then full restoration within roughly a month, without ever settling clearly on what the actual, durable policy should be.
The access gap CNBC surfaced is the more striking detail: the regulator that sounded the loudest alarm about Mythos's cyber capabilities has, months later, still not been able to test the model itself. That leaves the Fed in the position of relaying a threat assessment it can't independently verify or update as the model evolves -- a governance gap that undercuts the credibility of exactly the kind of warning system regulators need working smoothly as models like Mythos keep advancing.
What to watch: whether the Fed secures direct access to Mythos going forward, and whether this episode becomes the template -- alarm, export control, partial restoration, full restoration, all within weeks -- for how the government handles future frontier-model national-security concerns.
