Bank of America had to bring in 1,000 contractors to patch all the bugs Mythos identified

Bank of America recruited an additional 1,000 contractors to help patch all the vulnerabilities discovered by Anthropic’s Mythos model, the CEO said on Wednesday. Brian Moynihan, chairman and CEO at BoA, said during the company’s Q3 earnings call that it spent “a couple of hundred million plus” in remediation costs related to Mythos, and the anti-money laundering (AML) orders issued this week. These costs are expected to decline over time, though, with the contractors in place to help ease the initial burden of patching a large number of flaws, an issue that shouldn’t be so pronounced in the longer term. He went on to tell CNBC that the bank brought in outside help after concerns grew over how it would quickly tackle all the work associated with Mythos’ discoveries. The same concerns were shared globally, in part due to how Anthropic marketed Mythos as an all-powerful model that threatened the status quo of cybersecurity. While it ultimately turned out to be highly effective and capable of identifying complex vulnerabilities quicker than humans, leading to the massive influx of patches, some early adopters say it was no smarter than elite researchers. Mozilla CTO Bobby Holley said in April: "So far we've found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can't," after Mythos found 271 flaws in Firefox 150. "We also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher." The 1,000 contractors brought in by the bank in its Q2 added to its existing 3,000 technical staff. The contractors remain at the bank for now, although their assistance won’t be needed in the longer term. Moynihan told financial analysts on the bank’s earnings call that BoA has made its tech engineering workforce around 10 percent more efficient, and that each of the circa 130 AI-related projects it has running is expected to achieve a 2x or 3x return on investment over time. In 2026 alone, the CEO expects AI projects to deliver between $250 million and $300 million in benefits – a sum he expects to shoot up to $700 million by the end of 2027. He didn't detail how. The bank has also reduced around 3,000 roles, including a 5 percent decrease in the number of managers on the payroll, although it didn't specify how much of a role AI played. Moynihan didn’t break down how much of the “couple of hundred million plus” in remediation costs were devoted to AI or Mythos, compared to costs associated with cleaning up its AML issues, both of which the CEO lumped together. BoA’s share price slid more than 8 percent on Wednesday morning after it reported a 17 percent drop in profits owing to the $1.21 billion settlement it agreed to with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The FinCEN order relates to BoA’s failure to police national security risks, including Chinese money laundering, and a failure to report over $5 billion in suspicious activity. FinCEN’s order was issued concurrently with a $750 million penalty from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, related to Bank Secrecy Act and AML compliance deficiencies. BoA also agreed an $11.6 million settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control for sanctions violations, including those related to Iran, Russia, narcotics, and global terrorism. ®