Anthropic Wins Accolades From Canada's AI Minister Over Mythos Approach

A Canadian cabinet minister praised Anthropic PBC's decision to introduce its Mythos model to select companies and allow them to test the technology before releasing it more widely.

"Working with defenders first, rather than releasing this new model broadly, is the responsible path and gives people protecting critical systems a head start," Evan Solomon, Canada's minister responsible for artificial intelligence, said Tuesday after meeting with officials from the AI company.

Anthropic has warned that Mythos is powerful enough that it may be capable of cyberattacks if companies don't try it against their own systems and build defenses ahead of any wider release. The San Francisco-based company has limited access to a small number of firms initially, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. They're all part of "Project Glasswing," which will work to secure the most important systems before similar AI models become available.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned Wall Street leaders last week to a meeting on the related cyber risks. Treasury's technology team is now seeking to gain access to the Anthropic model so it can begin looking for vulnerabilities, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.

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Officials in the Canadian financial sector and government are also in active talks about the potential threats.

Last week, members of a government-industry committee known as the Canadian Financial Sector Resiliency Group met to discuss Mythos. The group includes representatives from the Bank of Canada, regulators, banks and other financial firms.

Desjardins Group, a large financial co-operative based in the province of Quebec, said it's "actively preparing" for the launch of Mythos. "We are working closely with various working groups, both in Canada and internationally, to anticipate challenges and ensure that our organization is ready to adopt this technology in a responsible and secure manner," a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Desjardins was hit by a huge leak in 2019 of the personal information of millions of Canadian customers, though it turned out to be the work of a rogue employee.

Solomon's brief comments made no mention of the specific vulnerabilities posed by the technology, nor of any efforts by the Canadian government to get access to Anthropic's model for testing. Instead, he lauded the company's preparation. "This is the kind of proactive approach we expect from frontier AI companies: identify risks early, engage governments and the security community, and put safeguards in place before capabilities are widely available," he said.

On Tuesday, Tobias Adrian, director of the monetary and capital markets department at the International Monetary Fund, warned that governments and regulators must "stay at the frontier" of rising threats from artificial intelligence, adding that it's important for global financial stability that security threats are quickly addressed.