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Comment by ckcheng | Hacker News Reader

The strangest thing I found is:

> on April 7, 2026 … U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent, in-person meeting in Washington with the chief executives of [major US banks] to brief them directly on the cyber risks posed by [Anthropic’s] Mythos

Then a similar meeting happened with the Canadian Financial Sector Resiliency Group (i.e. the Bank of Canada, the Canadian government’s Department of Finance, the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (Canada’s FDIC) and Canada’s six major banks).

Multiple central banks don’t usually do that right?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/anthropics-new-ai-mo...

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Two possibilities:

1. Fear that a major vulnerability is found in a commonly used software package that puts multiple major banks and e-commerce sites at risk

2. Fear that major vulnerabilities are found in multiple, widely used software packages that lead to market downturn as IT company stocks crash.

Probably others as well. Sounds more like a brief on worst-case scenarios that may happen and how they would effect the US banking sector. This is an important mid-year election this year too, so any big economic shock would be bad for the GOP.

That, or, not completely unlikely, he was shown all the vulnerabilities across all old software that banking, finance et al use daily and are unlikely to ever update. I am only half joking. There is a reason I think some people should stick to their areas of expertise.

It currently works because those vulnerabilities are not exploited en masse. With AI, they can. It does change the game.

I am personally of several minds about it. However, I am not an expert in the field. I can somewhat reliably opine on humans and human behavior in general, but I concede that is harder to consider the impact in aggregate.

How can money stolen from bank accounts even be offramped? It makes perfect sense to me how it works within crypto—transactions are not reversible. But how does this work in trad-fi, can't any money transferred just be sent back by the banks by editing the ledgers?

>can't any money transferred just be sent back by the banks by editing the ledgers?

No, traditional western finance isn't like a unified database, but rather many controlled by different parties in different countries. In theory you could write it back, but it's closer to bittorrent - if someone downloads a song from you then you can't just take it back.

Some stuff can be voided and there are clearing house mechanisms but if money moves fast enough across enough borders then getting it back is near impossible

Stealing is one possible problem (transactions out of country are really hard to claw back), but the major fear is probably stability. You won't like the consequences if a significant percentage of your countries banks are down for a few days...

Good job Anthropic products can't be used by the government then.

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