Anthropic CEO warns of cyber ‘moment of danger’ as AI exposes thousands of vulnerabilities

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned Tuesday that artificial intelligence has created a narrow window for the world's tech firms, governments and banks to fix tens of thousands of software vulnerabilities found by his company's latest model.

That AI model, Mythos, was previewed last month along with the disclosure that it had unearthed decades-old vulnerabilities in crucial software.

Since AI models from geopolitical adversary China are "maybe six to 12 months" behind the Anthropic product, there is "roughly that amount of time" to fix these issues, Amodei said.

The comments came during an Anthropic event in which Amodei shared the stage with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and unveiled a new suite of agents meant to automate financial work.

"The danger is just some enormous increase in the amount of vulnerabilities, in the amount of breaches, in the financial damage that's done from ransomware on schools, hospitals, not to mention banks," Amodei said.

Anthropic has limited Mythos to a few partner companies because of concerns about what criminals or adversarial nations could do with it. The last several of the company's model updates have reverberated through the markets, but Mythos has caused the most concern from corporations and policymakers alike.

The scale of potential cyber exploits has ballooned with each generation of Claude, Amodei said. An earlier Anthropic model found roughly 20 vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser. Mythos found nearly 300, and the total count across all software now runs into the tens of thousands, he said.

Most of the vulnerabilities found by Mythos haven't been publicly disclosed because they remain unpatched, and "the bad guys will exploit" them if they are identified, Amodei said.

Despite the alarm, both Amodei and Dimon also struck a note of conditional optimism.

"This is about a moment of danger where if we respond to it correctly, and I think we started to take the first steps, then we can have a better world on the other side," Amodei said. "There are only so many bugs to find."

Dimon also said that while the cyber fears were justified, the cybersecurity risks created by AI are a "transitory period."

On the question of regulation, Amodei said that AI oversight should resemble what's done in the automotive industry, striking a balance between consumer safety and allowing the industry to compete.

"You can't just start a car company without 'Are there brakes on this thing?'" he said. "We need to grope our way to some process that lets the industry operate expeditiously, is fair, but puts guardrails on the most serious things."

The company's event, and its setting with Dimon, the financial industry's best-known spokesman, seemed to demonstrate Anthropic's lead over OpenAI in the enterprise AI market as both companies head toward potential IPOs.

Anthropic announced on Tuesday an expansion of its financial services platform, including 10 new AI agents for investment banking and back-office work, as well as integration across Microsoft's various Office programs. The company also said its latest widely available model — Claude Opus 4.7 — leads benchmarks for financial analysis tasks.