The new AI model that could steal your life savings

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Anthropic’s AI model, Claude Mythos, is very powerful. SO powerful it can find software vulnerabilities that might let it, I don’t know, steal your bank login information. Anthropic is holding back the model from a wider release for now. Today on the show, how worried should we really be about Mythos? And are its capabilities actually unique?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:11.5	In April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell called a special meeting with bank CEOs.
0:19.9	They wanted to make sure banks were keeping their digital
0:22.7	vaults secure in an age of rapidly advancing AI. They were responding to the AI company Anthropics
0:29.7	announcement. The AI company said it had a new model that was so state of the art, so clever,
0:36.2	so dangerous that it couldn't yet release it to the wider public.
0:41.1	Anthropic called the model Claude Mithos.
0:44.0	Michael Moore heads up the company's cybersecurity products.
0:47.2	He says the new model could identify thousands of software vulnerabilities.
0:52.1	What that means is someone who was writing the software at some point didn't quite do something
0:57.1	right.
0:57.6	And that left a door kind of ajar.
0:59.8	And an attacker can get in through that door.
1:02.5	This is the indicator from Planet Money.
1:04.5	I'm Jarian Woods.
1:05.7	And I'm Waylon Wong.
1:07.0	Today on the show, is our money still safe in our bank accounts?
1:11.5	We learn about the double-edged sword of increasingly capable AI, and we ask whether
1:16.9	Claude Methos' unique capabilities are just a myth, or a meath.
1:25.8	The new AI model, Claude Mythos, is in some ways a typical language model.
1:31.3	It wasn't fundamentally different from a chatbot changed to answer general questions or
1:35.9	write lines of code like Anthropics other Claude models or ChatGBT.T.
	...

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