Anthropic's Amodei meets Wiles and Bessent at the White House over Mythos access and Pentagon standoff - The Next Web

So Dario Amodei has taken his existential safety lecture circuit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where he apparently had 'productive and constructive' talks with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about giving the government access to Mythos. The model that can find thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in hours — the very capability that makes cybersecurity harder — is now being negotiated as a national security asset, provided the Pentagon remains blacklisted. Because nothing says 'safety-first' like weaponising your safety restrictions as leverage in a high-stakes standoff with the world's largest military.

Anthropic's refusal to drop its 'safety restrictions' for the Defence Department created this impasse, which the White House is now trying to circumvent by routing Mythos through civilian agencies. So the company that built its brand on principled caution is now offering to hand the keys to a vulnerability-finding superweapon to the Treasury Department instead. One imagines Bessent will use it to audit tax code loopholes with unprecedented efficiency, or perhaps just to find all the zero-days in TurboTax. The Pentagon, meanwhile, gets to watch from the sidelines as the civilian bureaucracy gets first dibs on the tools that could redefine cyber warfare.

The thaw is telling: when your model is too dangerous for the military but just dangerous enough for the rest of the executive branch, you've achieved a perfect regulatory grey zone. Amodei gets to keep his 'safety' halo intact while functionally enabling state-level offensive capabilities through the back door. And the White House gets to call it 'productive' because everyone agreed not to mention the elephant in the room: that Mythos doesn't just find vulnerabilities — it creates a whole new class of autonomously weaponised old ones. Cheers to constructive ambiguity.