A thousand contractors, hired in the second quarter, still there
Bank of America brought in 1,000 outside contractors to patch software vulnerabilities exposed by advanced AI models including Anthropic’s Mythos, chief executive Brian Moynihan told CNBC on Wednesday, in an interview after the bank’s third-quarter earnings.
“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,” Moynihan said. The work covers both the bank’s own code and vendor software. On the reason for the scramble, he said: “That risk is real risk, and that’s why when the frontier-type models came out. … A lot of us sat down and said, ‘How do we figure out how to get through this quickly?’”
What it cost
Moynihan told analysts earlier the same day that the bank spent a “couple hundred million plus” in the third quarter on software remediation combined with regulatory work on anti-money-laundering compliance. He did not separate the two figures, and said he expects the patching costs to fall over time.
CNBC notes that these are among the first comments by a major US corporation specifying the manpower and money spent defending against Mythos, which Anthropic released in April to a small group of banks, technology firms and government agencies rather than to the public.
The same technology on both sides of the ledger
The story is a clean illustration of the two-sided bill. The same class of model that can read decades-old code and find the holes in it has forced the bank into a defensive spend it did not plan for, while CNBC reports that the bank’s 130 internal AI projects are projected to save $700 million next year.
The Decoder notes that Anthropic said Mythos found thousands of serious security vulnerabilities, and that OpenAI followed in May with its own Daybreak cybersecurity programme.
What to watch
The interesting number is the one nobody has yet published: how far down the 4,000-person figure goes, and how quickly. Moynihan expects it to fall. If other banks disclose comparable headcounts in their own earnings calls, the cost of being on the receiving end of a frontier security model stops being a story about one bank.
