Bank of America Hired 1,000 Contractors to Patch Flaws Exposed by AI Models, CEO Says
Bank of America brought in 1,000 outside contractors to patch software vulnerabilities exposed by advanced AI models including Anthropic's Mythos, adding hundreds of millions of dollars in third-quarter costs, CEO Brian Moynihan said.
Moynihan described the work in an interview with CNBC's Leslie Picker after the bank released third-quarter earnings. He said that earlier this year the company rushed to bolster a wide spectrum of its internal and vendor code, using thousands of employees as well as outside personnel.
"That risk is real risk, and that's why when the frontier-type models came out. ... A lot of us sat down and said, 'How do we figure out how to get through this quickly?'" Moynihan told Picker.
"We put on 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, on top of the 3,000 people we have in that area," he said.
Speaking to analysts earlier Wednesday, Moynihan said the bank spent a "couple hundred million plus" in the third quarter on the software remediation and on regulatory issues related to anti-money laundering compliance.
According to the CNBC account, the contractors were engaged during the second quarter and were still working on remediation at the time of the earnings release, alongside the bank's existing staff assigned to that area.
The account did not specify how many vulnerabilities the bank identified, which systems or vendors were affected, or which of the flaws were tied to any particular model. Moynihan placed the releases of frontier-type models at the start of the effort, describing the bank's response as an attempt to move quickly across both its own code and software supplied by outside vendors.
The interview was reported by CNBC and summarized by Slashdot.