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The White House is reportedly planning to grant US agencies access to Anthropic’s Mythos AI tool, despite tensions with the Pentagon, highlighting the growing role of generative AI in government operations and policy decisions.
An official said the White House was working with frontier AI labs to ensure their models help secure critical software against vulnerabilities, adding that any new technology requires a period of technical evaluation for fidelity and security.
The US government is planning to make a version of Anthropic's frontier AI model Mythos available to major federal agencies amid concerns that the tool could sharply increase cybersecurity risk, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday (April 17, 2026).
Gregory Barbaccia, federal chief information officer at the White House Office of Management and Budget, told Cabinet department officials in an email on Tuesday that the OMB was setting up protections to allow their agencies to begin using Mythos, according to Bloomberg News.
Barbaccia's email does not definitively say that various agencies would get Mythos access, nor does it provide a timeline for when it might come or how they might use it, the Bloomberg report added.
Its advanced coding ability allows it to detect and potentially exploit weaknesses, making it a powerful tool for cybersecurity testing. Departments such as energy and finance believe access could help strengthen defenses and prepare for cyber threats to critical infrastructure.
Announced on April 7, Mythos is being deployed as part of Anthropic's "Project Glasswing," a controlled initiative as part of which select organizations are permitted to use the unreleased Claude Mythos Preview model for defensive cybersecurity purposes.
Mythos is one of Anthropic's latest models developed as part of its broader AI system called Claude, a rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
It was revealed by Anthropic earlier this month, when developers responsible for testing AI models and their performance of so-called "misaligned" tasks - which go against human values, goals and behavior - said it was "strikingly capable at computer security tasks".
Mythos has found "thousands" of major vulnerabilities in operating systems, web browsers and other software. Its capabilities to code at a high level have given it a potentially unprecedented ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and devise ways to exploit them, experts said.
"We're working closely with model providers, other industry partners, and the intelligence community to ensure the appropriate guardrails and safeguards are in place before potentially releasing a modified version of the model to agencies," Barbaccia said in the email, which had "Mythos Model Access" as the subject, the report said.
Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne told the BBC that Mythos had been discussed extensively at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting in Washington DC this week.
"Certainly it is serious enough to warrant the attention of all the finance ministers," he said.
"The difference is that the Strait of Hormuz - we know where it is and we know how large it is... the issue that we're facing with Anthropic is that it's the unknown, unknown."
"This is requiring a lot of attention so that we have safeguards, and we have processes in place to make sure that we ensure the resiliency of our financial systems," he added.
Also Read: Top Free AI Courses on Claude by Anthropic (With Certificates) in 2026
The potential adoption comes amid a clear divide within the US administration. The Pentagon has barred Anthropic from defense-related contracts, calling it a “supply chain risk” and asking vendors to remove its tools from military systems. The matter is also tied to ongoing legal proceedings. Despite this, Anthropic continues to engage with the government's non-military arms.
The disagreement stems from Anthropic’s position on how its AI can be used. The company has said it will not allow its models to be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
That has led to friction with the Pentagon, which wants broader operational flexibility.
“There's progress with the White House. There's no progress with [the Department of] War,” an administration official told the news agencies.
Another official said the government “has a responsibility to evaluate every model to see where the frontier of tech is,” while also accusing the company of amplifying concerns around Mythos’ cyber capabilities.
Highlighting the divide, one official told: “All the intel agencies use Anthropic. Every agency except War wants to. That's because Anthropic doesn't want to kill people, and War's position is 'don't tell us what the f*** to do.' But if you're the Department of Energy, you don't give a f*** about that. You're worried about the Chinese attacking the energy grid. So you want Anthropic.”
