Bank of America adds 1,000 contractors to fix Mythos-found bugs

Bank of America hired an additional 1,000 contractors to patch vulnerabilities found by Anthropic's Mythos model, chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan said during the bank's third-quarter earnings call on 15 October 2026, according to The Register.

Moynihan said the bank spent "a couple of hundred million plus" on remediation costs tied to both Mythos and anti-money laundering orders issued this week. He did not break down how much of that figure went to the Mythos work as opposed to cleaning up the compliance problems, the report said. The costs are expected to fall over time, with the contractors brought in to absorb the initial burden of patching a large number of flaws, an issue the bank does not expect to be as pronounced in the longer term.

The CEO told CNBC that the bank sought outside help after concerns grew about how quickly it could work through everything Mythos had turned up, according to The Register. The contractors were added during the bank's second quarter, on top of roughly 3,000 existing technical staff, and remain at the bank for now.

The Register reported that similar concerns were raised globally, partly because of how Anthropic marketed Mythos as an all-powerful model that threatened the status quo of cybersecurity. In practice the model proved highly effective and able to identify complex vulnerabilities faster than humans, producing a large influx of patches, though some early adopters said it was no smarter than elite researchers. Mozilla CTO Bobby Holley said in April, after Mythos found 271 flaws in Firefox 150: "So far we've found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can't." He added: "We also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher."

On the same call, Moynihan said the bank's technology engineering workforce had become around 10 percent more efficient, and that each of its roughly 130 AI-related projects is expected to return two to three times its investment over time. He said AI projects should deliver between $250 million and $300 million in benefits in 2026, rising to $700 million by the end of 2027, but did not explain how those figures were reached. The bank has also cut about 3,000 roles, including a 5 percent reduction in managers, without specifying what part AI played.

The disclosures landed on a difficult day. The Register reported that Bank of America's share price fell more than 8 percent on Wednesday morning after it posted a 17 percent drop in profits, driven by a $1.21 billion settlement with the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. That order concerns the bank's failure to police national security risks, including Chinese money laundering, and a failure to report more than $5 billion in suspicious activity. It was issued alongside a $750 million penalty from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency over Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering compliance shortcomings. The bank also agreed an $11.6 million settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control over sanctions violations, including matters related to Iran, Russia, narcotics and global terrorism.