How ‘fears’ about Anthropic's AI model Mythos made CEOs of Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, CrowdStrike and others do a concall with the US government

Before Anthropic previewed its most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model, Mythos, to even a limited audience, the US government was reportedly already worried. CNBC claims that Vice President JD Vance and treasury secretary Scott Bessent held a private call with some of the most powerful technology CEOs in the world last week to discuss the security implications of Anthropic’s new model which is said to be so capable that it reportedly prompted the company to restrict its release over fears it could expose hidden cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

CNBC says that the call was confirmed by two people familiar with the matter.

CEOs Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, among others were on call

CNBC reports that alongside Vance and Bessent on the government side, the call included Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Elon Musk of xAI, George Kurtz of CrowdStrike and Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks.The meeting focused on two specific concerns: the security posture of large language models (LLMs) and how to safely deploy them as well as how to respond if AI capabilities begin to scale in ways that give attackers an advantage over defenders.Anthropic’s Mythos triggered the call. The company's own researchers assessed it and they found something alarming enough to justify that instead of releasing it publicly, they gave restricted access to a group of approximately 40 major technology companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.That prospect of AI tipping the balance between attack and defence in cybersecurity was what Vance and Bessent wanted to discuss with the industry.

US government meeting with America’s largest banks

The claims on conference call by CNBC come soon after reports said that Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell called the heads of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to an urgent, short-notice meeting on Tuesday (April 7). Dimon was invited but couldn't make it.Mythos rattled the market with a huge stock wipeout. The company’s earlier releases, including Claude Opus and its agent-building tools, triggered a roughly $2 trillion selloff in enterprise software stocks, as investors confronted AI's potential to gut the per-seat SaaS licensing model. If 10 AI agents can do the work of 100 employees, you don't need 100 software subscriptions. The rout has been dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.”When details of Mythos then leaked in late March through a configuration error at Anthropic, cybersecurity stocks took a further hit as the market processed a new fear that AI could also commoditise the very security tools meant to protect against it.