Bank of America hired 1,000 additional contractors in Q2 to help patch vulnerabilities found by Anthropic’s Mythos model. Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan said on Wednesday that the contractors are still working with the bank.
Moynihan told analysts on the bank’s Q3 earnings call that it had spent “a couple of hundred million plus” on remediation tied to Mythos and anti-money laundering orders issued this week. He did not say how much went to each. He expects the costs to decline over time.
Speaking to CNBC, Moynihan said the bank sought outside help because it was concerned about how quickly it could handle the work created by Mythos’ findings. The contractors joined an existing technical staff of 3,000. Moynihan said the extra help would not be needed in the longer term.
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Anthropic’s claims about Mythos had raised cybersecurity concerns beyond the bank. Early users found that the model could identify complex vulnerabilities quickly, adding to the volume of patches. Some said its findings did not exceed what elite human researchers could discover.
After Mythos found 271 flaws in Firefox 150, 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.” He added: “We also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher.”
Moynihan also told analysts that Bank of America had made its technology engineering workforce about 10 percent more efficient. He said each of roughly 130 AI-related projects was expected to return two or three times its investment over time. He projected AI benefits of $250 million to $300 million in 2026 and $700 million by the end of 2027, without detailing how the bank would achieve those figures.
The bank has reduced about 3,000 roles, including a 5 percent cut in managers. It did not specify how much AI contributed to those reductions.
Regulatory costs also weighed on results
Bank of America shares fell more than 8 percent on Wednesday morning after it reported a 17 percent decline in profit. The bank agreed to a $1.21 billion settlement with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.
FinCEN’s order concerns failures to police national security risks, including Chinese money laundering, and to report more than $5 billion in suspicious activity. At the same time, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency imposed a $750 million penalty over Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering compliance deficiencies. The bank also agreed to an $11.6 million settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control over sanctions violations involving Iran, Russia, narcotics and global terrorism.
For now, the 1,000 contractors remain at the bank to help finish the patching work. Moynihan expects that need, and the associated remediation costs, to ease over time.
