Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors to patch software flaws exposed by Anthropic's Mythos
Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors to patch software flaws exposed by Anthropic’s Mythos, offering a rare look at costs involved in defending against AI.
Key points
- Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors in Q2 to patch software flaws exposed by Anthropic's Mythos.
- CEO Brian Moynihan said the bank spent a couple hundred million plus on remediation and AML compliance.
- The bank expects remediation costs to decline over time as patching needs ease.
Bank of America hired 1,000 external contractors to help patch software vulnerabilities exposed by advanced AI models including Anthropic's Mythos, CEO Brian Moynihan told CNBC on Wednesday. In an interview after the bank's third-quarter earnings release, Moynihan said the company rushed earlier this year to bolster internal and vendor code using thousands of employees and outside personnel.
Moynihan said the contractors were brought on in the second quarter and remain today, in addition to 3,000 people already working in that area. The bank spent a couple hundred million plus in the third quarter on software remediation and regulatory issues tied to anti-money laundering compliance, he told analysts earlier Wednesday.
Why the bank acted
Moynihan described the risk as real, saying that when frontier-type models came out, many at the bank asked how to get through it quickly. His comments are among the first by a major U.S. corporation to specify the manpower and dollars spent protecting systems from Mythos, which was released to a small group of banks, technology firms and government agencies in April.
The situation highlights AI's dual nature: it can save money by boosting productivity, but models like Mythos can uncover and exploit decades-old software flaws, forcing costly defensive work.
We put on 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, on top of the 3,000 people we have in that area.
— Brian Moynihan
Costs and AI savings
Moynihan sought to reassure investors that the spending increase was temporary, saying that once you patch, you don't have to patch as much and that remediation costs are expected to decline over time. His remarks came as the company's shares fell as much as 8% Wednesday.
In other areas, AI is helping cut expenses. Bank of America has about 130 internal AI projects, with savings expected to rise from $300 million this year to $700 million in 2027. The bank's head count fell by about 3,400 employees in the past year as it cut roughly 5% of managers; it is unclear how much of that reduction is attributable to AI.
