Bank of America has hired an army of outside contractors to help patch software vulnerabilities exposed by advanced artificial intelligence models, including Anthropic’s Mythos, the bank’s CEO Brian Moynihan told CNBC on Wednesday.
In an interview after the bank’s third-quarter results were released, Moynihan said that early in the year the company rushed to strengthen a broad spectrum of its internal code and that of its suppliers using thousands of employees and external staff.
“That risk is a real risk, and that’s why when the frontier-type models came along. …Many of us have sat down and asked ourselves, “How can we find a way to get through this quickly?” Moynihan told CNBC’s Leslie Picker.
“We hired 1,000 contractors to help us do the repair work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, in addition to the 3,000 people we have in this area,” he said.
The bank spent “more than a few hundred million” on software remediation and regulatory matters related to anti-money laundering compliance in the third quarter, Moynihan told analysts earlier Wednesday.
The comments are among the first from a major U.S. company to detail the manpower and dollars spent to protect Mythos’ software systems, which was released to a small group of banks, technology companies and government agencies in April.
They also highlight the double-edged nature of AI: While it can help companies save money by increasing productivity, the ability of models like Mythos to discover and exploit decades-old software flaws has also forced companies into a costly defensive scramble.
“We have to stay ahead of them and we have to keep in mind that the people who develop the software are the ones who are trying to sell us the services,” Moynihan said.
Still, Moynihan – speaking as his company’s shares fell 8% on Wednesday – sought to reassure investors that the increased spending was temporary.
“Once you’ve applied the fixes, you don’t need to reapply as many. … The pipeline passes,” Moynihan said, adding that the bank expects remediation costs to decrease over time.
In other places, AI is helping to reduce expenses. Bank of America has about 130 internal AI projects, and savings from those efforts are expected to increase from $300 million this year to $700 million in 2027, Moynihan told analysts.
Bank of America’s workforce has fallen by about 3,400 employees over the past year as the company shed about 5% of its executives, he said. It is unclear how much of this downsizing is attributable to AI.
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