Bank of America brought in about 1,000 outside contractors in the second quarter to repair software weaknesses exposed by AI models, chief executive Brian Moynihan said on 14 October. One of those models, he said, was Anthropic’s Mythos.
Moynihan disclosed the figure in an interview with CNBC after the bank reported third-quarter results, and discussed it again on the earnings call. TNW has not independently verified the numbers.
About 3,000 of the bank’s own staff were already assigned to the same work before the contractors joined, Moynihan told CNBC.
According to his account, the weaknesses lay in the code used by both the bank and its outside vendors.
Moynihan told analysts on the call that the quarter included “a couple hundred million dollars plus” in remediation costs.
That sum covered two separate jobs: the Mythos work and repairs to the bank’s anti-money-laundering controls. He expects the Mythos share to shrink now that the extra workers are in place.
The 1,000 contractors are “not in the headcount” because the bank hired them as consultants, Moynihan said.
The compliance spending follows Treasury penalties of more than $1.21 billion announced on 13 October.
Federal regulators said the bank had failed to report suspicious transactions worth $5 billion and to finish steps ordered in 2024.
Revenue for the quarter rose about 3% to nearly $30 billion. Even so, adjusted earnings of $1.08 a share fell short of analyst forecasts, and the stock closed almost 5% lower.
Anthropic made Mythos available in April to a small group of companies, banks, and government agencies through a programme called Project Glasswing. The aim was to let them find and patch flaws before attackers did.
A month later, US regulators paused some cyber exams to give the largest banks time to fix what the model had found.
Moynihan had signalled the scale of the task before. In July he told Bloomberg Television that the model meant a big change in the amount of work banks would have to do.
Jamie Dimon, who runs JPMorgan Chase, said in May that his bank had hundreds of people on the job full-time.
Pressure from supervisors is also rising. Regulators in the US and Europe are questioning banks about AI agents and cyber risks, and the European Central Bank wants plans against AI-enabled threats by the end of October.