TJ Walker warns that Anthropic's new AI model Mythos can exploit vulnerabilities in banking, power grids, and supply chains. Unlike nuclear weapons, advanced AI removes barriers to mass disruption, allowing any well-funded actor to cause cascading failures within 18 months. Walker argues global governance lags far behind the technology race.
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Ultimize. According to the New York Times, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has developed a model called Mythos so powerful that it is restricting access, warning that it can identify and exploit vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, including banks, power grids, and government systems. Officials have taken that seriously. The governor of the Bank of England warned the model could, quote, crack the whole cyber risk world open, while governments across Europe and beyond began urgently assessing their defenses. Now, that's the setup. That sounds kind of boring so far, right? Why, why should anyone really care about this? Well, let's talk about why people in very expensive suits suddenly look like they've seen a ghost, because this is not just about better technology. This is about breaking the systems that make modern life possible. And the easiest way to understand that is not with code, but with your bank account. You have a bank account, right? I don't. I thought— yes, you do. You— we just don't give you access to it. Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning, you open your bank app, you're expecting to see $5,000, $10,000, enough money for rent, mortgages, grocery, your life, and instead it says Zero. Gone. Now, if that happens to you alone, well, that's a nightmare for you. You call the bank, you scream, you sit on hold for 3 hours listening to some bad jazz music, but eventually maybe they fix it. That's one person's problem. Now imagine it happens to everyone in your city, everyone in your state, then your entire country, then globally. Every bank account, every balance, every record. Suddenly nobody knows what everyone has. Who owns what? Who owes what? Who's solvent? Who's bankrupt? The answer is nobody knows. That's not an inconvenience. That's the end of the financial system because the financial system is not money, it's trust. It's the shared belief that when your screen says you have $10,000, you actually have $10,000. Take that belief away and everything stops. Businesses don't know it if they've been paid. Employees don't know if they'll ever be paid. Banks don't know what they owe. Governments don't know what to guarantee. Credit freezes. Transactions stop. Supply chains break. And very quickly you move from my app is glitching to we can't get food into cities. Because trucks don't move without payments, payments don't move without banks, banks don't function without data. So yeah, within days, maybe hours in some places, you start seeing empty shelves, then panic, then real hardship. And that's just the banking system. Now layer in power grids because this same category of artificial intelligence isn't just looking at financial systems, It could look at infrastructure, electricity, communications, transportation. Imagine the same thing happens there. Lights go out, not in one building, but across regions. Communication networks fail. Emergency systems slow down or stop. Now you don't have an economic crisis, you have a societal one. And here's the darkly funny part, because there's always a dark funny spot somewhere. For years, we've all joked about technology failing. Oh, the Wi-Fi is down. Civilization is over. You wouldn't like it if Wi-Fi went down, would you? Well, it turns out that was less of a joke than we thought, because modern civilization is essentially a stack of systems that all assume the layer below them works. Take out enough of those layers, and suddenly we're all very nostalgic for paper maps and cash. That's the big problem. Now, to be clear, this hasn't happened yet. It's not happening tomorrow, but this is not run for the hills. This is why people are taking it seriously, because what Anthropic has built and what others are racing to build is not just a tool that does tasks. It's a tool that finds weaknesses systemically at scale faster than any human team. And once you find weaknesses, You can exploit them. Now let's go back to this analogy. For decades, the most dangerous technologies like nuclear weapons required enormous infrastructure, money, materials. You had to have enriched uranium, not something you can just conjure up or get from Amazon. You needed materials, scientists, time. That created kind of a natural barrier. Not everyone could do it. Now imagine if that barrier just disappears. Imagine if the most powerful disruptive capabilities in the world don't require a government, don't require billions of dollars, don't require years of development. Just intelligence, just code, just access. That's the shift. And that's why governments are nervous because this is not just about has the biggest military. It's about who has the smartest systems, or worse, who steals them or leaks them or misuses them. And here's where the gallows humor kicks in, because we're now in a situation where the most responsible actor in the story is the company saying, hmm, we built something terrifying and we're trying to be careful. That's the good news. The bad news They also said others could reach similar capabilities within about 18 months. 18 months, that's not a distant future. That's basically one or two iPhone upgrades away. So now you have a race, not just between countries, between companies, between actors who may not all be careful. And there are no global rules, no treaties, no shared understanding of limits, just hope. Which historically is not a great security strategy. Now bring it back to the human level because it's easy to think this is abstract. Well, it's not. It's your paycheck, your savings, your electricity, your ability to buy food, your ability to function in a system that works. And if that system is disrupted at scale, you don't get a warning, you get confusion. Then panic, then consequences, very real ones. So yeah, the story is being treated like a big deal because it is. It's not hype. It's not just another tech headline. It's a glimpse into a world where the most powerful tools are no longer just productive. They're potentially disruptive at a level we've never seen before. And the final slightly uncomfortable thought is this: For most of human history, power came from physical things— land, weapons, resources. Now it increasingly comes from something invisible: knowledge, algorithms, intelligence, which means the next global crisis might not start with something you can see. It might start with something you don't notice at all until you check your bank account and it says zero. So I'm joined today by my daughter, Rossa. It is Take Your Son or Daughter to Work Today. I'm hoping this problem gets fixed because we can't just rely on CEOs to act responsibly. Lean in a little so folks can see you, those not listening on the podcast. If you're listening on the podcast, you can check us out on the YouTube show and you can see it. Rossa, who, by the way, is a star in her own right. She has been the instructor of several online instruction courses on the Udemy platform—public speaking, how to create digital art, and others. So, and she's also an accomplished artist. So, Rossa, you may grow up one day and sell a painting or sculpture for $1 million someone pays you, but if artificial intelligence is so good that someone can just crack your account like that, and you get $0. You might have to come back and live with mommy and daddy even when you're 30 years old. Does that sound like fun? No. That's— she said no, if you didn't hear that. That's why this is such a serious issue. More in a moment. Let me just throw this out there for a second. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you already have more information than most people ever act on. That's not the problem. The problem is nothing is reinforcing it tomorrow or the next day. Or the next day. That's why I built Ultimize, to give you something you can use repeatedly, not just hear once and forget. So if this is resonating at all, just go to ultimize.com, grab the free course, communication skills, habit building, whichever one you want, and actually start putting this stuff into practice. It's free, no downside. Just go to ultimize.com. Ultimize.
