Staff Reports
Vice President JD Vance recently picked up the phone and did what too many in Washington refuse to do: he told the tech giants to slow down and explain themselves. After a private White House briefing about Anthropic’s new AI model, Mythos, Vance joined Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in convening a high-level call with top executives to discuss real national-security risks. This was not a tea party — it was a wake-up call about AI security, cyber threats, and how to protect hospitals, banks, and small-town America from the new kinds of attacks these systems could enable.
Who was on the call and why it matters
The players read like a who’s who of modern tech: Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the government side, and on the industry side SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft Chairman & CEO Satya Nadella, and leaders from major cybersecurity firms. The trigger was Anthropic’s preview of Mythos — a model reported to be able to autonomously find software vulnerabilities. Journalists are working from briefings and anonymous sources for some details, so we should be careful about repeating leaked phrasing as gospel. Still, the central point is plain: senior officials and industry leaders were asked to answer hard questions about AI-enabled cyber risk.
What Mythos revealed about AI cyber threats
Anthropic’s Mythos preview appears to have shown that advanced AI can do more than write text or summarize data — it can scout for flaws and even chain them together to exploit systems. That changes the game for cybersecurity. If these capabilities spread unchecked, bad actors could scale attacks against power grids, water plants, hospitals, and banks with frightening speed. Anthropic set up a limited preview program to let some partners use Mythos defensively, but the White House pushed back on broader distribution. Smart, targeted limits — not blanket bans — are the right first step when a new tool can be used to break as easily as to build.
Policy choices: pre-release vetting, industry partnership, and U.S. strength
Now the White House is weighing new tools: a government-industry vetting process for frontier models and potential executive actions that require some form of pre-release review for high-risk AI. That’s the conversation we should be having. Conservatives should back oversight that protects families, small businesses, and critical infrastructure while keeping America competitive with China. Vice President Vance’s so-called “techno-populist” posture — protecting working-class towns and demanding accountability from Big Tech — is politics that actually map to policy here. And let’s be blunt: trusting Silicon Valley to police itself is about as sensible as asking foxes to guard the henhouse.
Bottom line: guard the country without crippling innovation
Vice President JD Vance deserves credit for pressing the issue and forcing a serious public-private conversation about AI security. The administration must move quickly to create a narrow, practical vetting process that protects critical systems and preserves America’s edge. That means clear rules, accountable oversight, and fast collaboration with cyber defenders — not theater or heavy-handed rules that hand the advantage to geopolitical rivals. If Washington can get this right, we protect our towns and workers without surrendering innovation. If not, we will have learned the hard way why a phone call was worth making in the first place.
