How Anthropic’s Mythos threw the White House AI strategy into chaos

Vice President JD Vance gives remarks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. (White House Intern Photo by Julian Casciano)

By Amrith Ramkumar, Brian Schwartz and Natalie Andrews • May 08, 2026

On a recent call with the heads of the biggest artificial-intelligence companies, Vice President JD Vance was alarmed.

New AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos, which are capable of finding software vulnerabilities on their own, threatened to disrupt small-town banks, hospitals and water plants by starting cyberattacks that local governments weren’t equipped to handle, Vance said. “We all need to work together on this,” Vance told chief executive officers including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet’s Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, according to people familiar with the matter.

The April call, which followed a White House briefing that played a role in sparking Vance’s concern over the latest AI model capabilities, set in motion a chaotic administration response to Mythos that threatens to increase government oversight of AI and overhaul the administration’s tech agenda.