Bank of America has hired an army of third-party contractors to help it 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 earnings release, Moynihan said that earlier this year the company rushed to shore up a broad spectrum of its internal and vendor code using thousands of employees and outside staff. “That risk is a real risk, and that’s why when the frontier-type models came out… A lot of us sat down and said, ‘How can we figure out how to get through this quickly?’ Moynihan told CNBC’s Leslie Picker. “We hired 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people are still here today, helping us, in addition to the 3,000 people we have in that area,” he said. The bank spent “more than a couple hundred million” on software fixes and regulatory issues related to anti-money laundering compliance in the third quarter, Moynihan told analysts Wednesday. The comments are some of the first from a major U.S. corporation to specify the manpower and dollars spent to secure Mythos software systems, which was delivered 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 fight. “We have to stay ahead of them and we have to be aware 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 as much as 8% on Wednesday – tried to reassure investors that the increased spending was temporary. “Once it’s patched, you don’t have to patch as much…The process moves forward,” Moynihan said, adding that the bank expects remediation costs to decrease over time. Elsewhere, AI is helping to reduce expenses. Bank of America has about 130 internal AI projects, and savings from those efforts are expected to grow from $300 million this year to $700 million in 2027, Moynihan told analysts. Bank of America’s workforce fell by about 3,400 employees last year as the company cut about 5% of its managers, he said. It’s unclear how much of that workforce reduction is attributable to AI.
