Punchbowl Vault: Regulators dodge Qs on megabanks, Mythos

Prudential bank regulators declined to share details about the use of Anthropic’s Mythos model among the country’s largest banks during an oversight hearing before the House Financial Services Committee Thursday morning. 

Mythos has drawn widespread concern for its potential to exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities among sophisticated actors around the world, including in the finance industry. Some large banks are among the firms that have been given access to the model, though little is known about the full scope of the project.

Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) pressed the federal bank regulators for specifics about which banks, or how many, had been given access to Mythos. The officials representing the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and National Credit Union Administration all said they could not disclose that information.

Foster, who is the top Democrat on the Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions, said he was concerned that “smaller financial institutions have not received equivalent access [to Mythos] in a timely manner.”

“What’s the policy here?” Foster asked. “Who exactly received access to Mythos, on what time scale?” 

Michelle Bowman, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, said she could not disclose which banks had been given access.

“We’re working both with service providers and within the banking industry to work together to understand what impacts we may need to have them mitigate and address,” Bowman said.

Other regulators followed suit. “I also can’t disclose that,” Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said. Foster asked Gould to answer “in general terms,” or say “what fraction” of national banks had been given access to Mythos. Gould declined to answer. 

FDIC Chair Travis Hill also declined to answer. 

NCUA Chair Kyle Hauptman appealed to Foster’s sense of national security. 

“Anthropic, like OpenAI – they’re both in San Francisco,” Hauptman said. “The next Mythos may be in Beijing or Tehran or somewhere, and it’s not going to work as well for us.” 

- Brendan Pedersen

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