Summary: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday to negotiate access to Mythos, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence model that can identify and exploit thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across all major operating systems and browsers. The meeting follows the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic after Amodei refused to remove security restrictions, and comes as the US Treasury, the intelligence community, CISA and UK financial regulators seek access to the model through the Project Glasswing program controlled by Anthropic.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is expected to meet with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Friday in what represents the most significant step yet to resolve the company’s standoff with the Pentagon over its refusal to remove security restrictions from its AI models. The meeting comes as multiple US government agencies, including the Treasury Department, the intelligence community and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, seek access to Anthropic’s Mythos model, a border AI system whose cybersecurity capabilities have triggered emergency briefings from Washington to London to Ottawa.
Mythos, announced on April 7, is not a cybersecurity product. It is a general-purpose AI model that, during testing, turned out to be able to identify and exploit thousands of previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in all major operating systems and web browsers. It found flaws that had survived decades of human security review and millions of automated tests. When ordered to develop working exploits, it succeeded on the first try in more than 83% of cases. It is the first AI model to complete a 32-step corporate network attack simulation from start to finish.
Anthropic decided not to publish Mythos. Instead, it created Project Glasswing, an access-controlled program that provides the blueprint to approximately 40 vetted organizations, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Cisco, CrowdStrike, JPMorgan Chase, and Palo Alto Networks, to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical software before they can be exploited. The company has committed up to $100 million in Mythos usage credits and $4 million in donations to open source security organizations.
The Pentagon conflict
The White House meeting is the product of a dispute that has intensified since February. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that Anthropic grant the Pentagon unrestricted access to its models for all legal purposes, including potential use in autonomous weapons systems and domestic surveillance. Amodei refused. Hegseth designated Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk, a label previously reserved for companies associated with foreign adversaries, effectively blacklisting it from government contracts.
Anthropic sued the Trump administration in early March, filing two federal lawsuits alleging unlawful retaliation. A federal judge initially blocked the blacklisting, but an appeals court overturned that decision on April 8, leaving Anthropic locked out of Department of Defense contracts while litigation continues. The company can still work with other government agencies.
The paradox is that the same government that blacklisted Anthropic now wants access to its most powerful model. The Treasury Department is looking to Mythos to look for vulnerabilities in its own systems. Parts of the intelligence community and CISA are already testing it. The White House Office of Management and Budget is putting safeguards in place to allow federal agencies to use a controlled version. Axios reported that Anthropic hired Trumpworld consultants to facilitate negotiations and that Friday’s meeting is designed to pave the way to a deal.
Why are Myths important?
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said publicly that Mythos “reveals many more vulnerabilities” to cyberattacks. The UK AI Security Institute evaluated a preliminary version and found it “substantially more capable of committing cybercrime than any previously evaluated model,” noting that it is the first model capable of chaining multiple attack steps into complete end-to-end intrusions. The Council on Foreign Relations called it “a turning point for AI and global security.”
Mythos’ defensive argument is simple: If an AI model can find vulnerabilities that human security teams and automated testing have missed for decades, delivering that model to the organizations responsible for defending critical infrastructure will allow them to fix the holes before adversaries discover them. The offensive risk is equally clear: the same capability in hostile hands would be catastrophic. Anthropic’s decision to restrict access rather than publish it is a direct application of security principles that put it at odds with the Pentagon.
He business history of the company It gives you leverage in the negotiation. Anthropic’s annualized revenue has reached $30 billion, it has attracted bids from investors at a valuation of $800 billion, and it is exploring an initial public offering (IPO). It doesn’t need Pentagon contracts to survive. What he needs is a resolution that preserves his security commitments while restoring his ability to work with the broader U.S. government, a position Wiles’ meeting is designed to explore.
The global response
The myths have become a topic of concern far beyond Washington. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey explicitly mentioned it as a cybersecurity risk in a speech at Columbia University on April 15. The Bank’s Cross Market Operational Resilience Group is convening an emergency briefing within a fortnight with the chief executives of the UK’s eight largest banks, four financial infrastructure providers, two insurers and representatives from the Treasury, the Financial Conduct Authority and the National Cyber Security Centre.
Anthropic plans to provide access to Mythos to select British banks in a matter of days as part of Project Glasswing’s expansion, and is quadrupling its London office to 800 staff in King’s Cross. The UK AI Safety Institute, which has an evaluation partnership with Anthropic, published its technical evaluation on April 17. Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne described Mythos as an “unknown unknown” that is being discussed at IMF meetings. Global regulators are coordinating how to assess and manage cybersecurity implications.
He geopolitical dimension It’s inevitable. The US government’s desire to have access to Mythos exists in tension with its punishment of the company that built it. Anthropic’s willingness to provide the model to UK banks and regulators while embroiled in litigation with the Pentagon creates a situation in which the United States’ closest ally may have access to a critical national security tool before its own government. That dynamic gives the White House an incentive to resolve the dispute that transcends the original disagreement over security barriers.
What could an agreement be like?
The outlines of a possible resolution are visible. Anthropic would restore its eligibility for government contracts and provide access to Mythos for defensive cybersecurity purposes. The Pentagon would remove the supply chain risk designation. Anthropic would maintain its restrictions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance applications, but potentially agree to a process to review specific military use cases that don’t cross those lines. Both parties have reasons to reach an agreement: Anthropic because the blacklist damages its business credibilityand the administration because it needs technology.
Whether Amodei and Wiles reach that kind of agreement on Friday or simply begin the process to get there is less important than what the meeting represents. The company that created the most powerful cybersecurity tool in existence did so as a byproduct of creating a general-purpose AI model, then restricted its release for security reasons, then was punished by the government for upholding those same security principles, and is now being courted by that government because the tool is too valuable to ignore.
That sequence captures something essential about the state of AI governance in April 2026. Technology is advancing faster than the institutions responsible for managing it can adapt, and companies that take security seriously are simultaneously rewarded by the market and penalized by the state. Mythos is the clearest example yet of a model whose capabilities are so momentous that restricting and unleashing them are defensible positions, and the discussion between them takes place not in a research paper or a Congressional hearing, but in the West Wing.
