Bank of America hires 1,000 consultants to strengthen defenses against cyberattacks by out-of-control AI agents

Bank of America, the second-largest US bank, hired an additional 1,000 external consultants to guard against high-performance AI models exploiting its software vulnerabilities. CEO Brian Moynihan disclosed this on the October 14 earnings call and said in a CNBC interview that the development of high-performance models such as Anthropic's Mythos has highlighted exploitable security flaws in code shared by the bank's internal staff and external vendors. He said 1,000 contract personnel were deployed in the second quarter to help with patching, on top of the 3,000 personnel already in place; the related spending exceeded several hundred million dollars, which, besides fixing software issues, also included costs for addressing anti-money-laundering compliance issues related to a $1.2 billion US Treasury sanctions penalty. Mythos is a restricted-access AI model known for its ability to find software weaknesses and use them for attacks, and it has been gradually released since April 2026 after safety guardrails were put in place. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Bloomberg in early October that after the model's release, cybersecurity risk jumped 10-fold.