Washington DC - The heads of America's biggest banks met this week with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to weigh the security implications of a new artificial intelligence system developed by Anthropic, according to reports on Friday.

The gathering was convened on the sidelines of an event in Washington, with officials calling the extra session to address Anthropic's newly unveiled Claude Mythos model, Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported.

The US Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Federal Reserve had no comment.

Mythos was launched on Tuesday in a tightly restricted preview to roughly 40 partner organizations under an initiative called Project Glasswing.

Anthropic's partners include Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, CrowdStrike, and JPMorgan Chase.

According to the company and its partners, Mythos can autonomously scan vast amounts of code to find and chain together previously unknown security vulnerabilities in critical systems – from operating systems to web browsers.

Crucially, they warn, this can be done at a speed and scale no human hacker could match, meaning that it could be used to bring down banks, hospitals, or national infrastructure within hours.

Anthropic said Mythos has identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities – flaws previously unknown to developers – in every major operating system and every major web browser, along with a range of other critical pieces of software.

"This work is too important and too urgent to do alone," Cisco chief security and trust officer Anthony Grieco said in a joint statement on Glasswing.

Project partners are to share their Mythos findings, according to Anthropic, which is providing about $100 million worth of computing resources for the mission.

Early work with AI models has shown they can help find and fix software and hardware vulnerabilities at a pace and scale not previously possible, Grieco added.

Anthropic said it has held discussions with the US government regarding Mythos despite a White House decree in February terminating all contracts with the startup.