Jamie Dimon and Dario Amodei dodge the question of whether the AI cyber ‘freakout’ is justified

(SeaPRwire) –   When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei appeared on stage in Lower Manhattan alongside Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO and Anthropic’s newly minted partner, Andrew Ross Sorkin got straight to the question on everyone’s mind that morning. “Is the widespread panic over AI-powered cyberattacks warranted?” asked the CNBC host and veteran New York Times business journalist.

Both men paused. The audience laughed. Amodei looked toward Dimon, who did what powerful figures often do when the truthful answer is uncomfortable: he spoke around the question at length, with commanding authority.

“Cyber risk is our biggest threat,” Dimon said. “It has been our biggest risk for years.” Dimon recalled he had previously warned AI would worsen cyber risks — and that was before Anthropic developed its Mythos model, which the company itself deemed too dangerous to release widely.

That could sound like a clear “yes” to the question. But Dimon quickly shifted focus to solutions, timelines, and reassured the crowd that the financial sector is well-prepared. For his part, Amodei called the risks “very real” — then spent several minutes explaining why, if all parties respond properly, outcomes could actually end up better than they were before.

Neither man said the panic was unwarranted. Neither said it was warranted, either.

What they did reveal was already alarming enough

The on-stage exchange came weeks after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell held an emergency meeting with Wall Street CEOs to discuss the systemic risks Mythos poses. It also came as Anthropic continues fighting the Pentagon in court over the Trump administration’s decision to label the company a “supply chain risk,” after it refused to let the military use its technology for “any lawful purpose.” The appearance also capped a chaotic few days of Wall Street-focused announcements from Anthropic, which counts the financial sector as a key customer and a key channel for selling its AI models to other companies across industries.

This first-ever joint stage appearance from Dimon and Amodei found the pair sitting side-by-side and projecting calm. But the details they shared told a different story about a highly unstable, fast-changing situation.

In some ways, the subtext of their exchange was more alarming than a simple “yes” would have been. Amodei laid out a detailed timeline of rapidly escalating threats tied to Anthropic’s newest model. Six months ago, he said, Anthropic detected the first attempts by Chinese state-linked actors to launch cyberattacks on U.S. tech companies using Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. Three months ago, an earlier Anthropic model found roughly 20 vulnerabilities in Firefox.

“Now, with Mythos, we found almost 300 vulnerabilities in Firefox, plus thousands, and likely tens of thousands by now, that remain unpublicized behind closed doors,” he said.

Amodei noted that six months ago, Anthropic sent a representative to Congress to testify about the growing cybersecurity risks posed by increasingly advanced AI models, and the company has been disclosing vulnerabilities as it finds them, including the ones in Firefox.

“So I think the risks are very real,” Amodei said.

The Anthropic CEO said he “would guess” other leading AI labs are around one to three months behind his company, while Chinese AI models are “maybe six to 12 months behind.” (Though OpenAI has already released GPT-5.5, a model that U.K. government testing found performs nearly as well as Mythos at orchestrating a full end-to-end cyberattack.) That means we have roughly that window of time to fix all these vulnerabilities, he said, and there are a great many of them.

“We’ve identified tens of thousands of these vulnerabilities,” he said. “The reason we haven’t announced most of them is, of course, that only a small fraction have been fixed so far.”

That is pretty much the definition of a situation that warrants widespread panic.

On regulation, neither man supports the FDA model

Amodei opted not to call for a public “freak out,” but he did make clear there is a race against time to patch the vulnerabilities that Mythos and other advanced AI models are uncovering. Dimon agreed that patches need to be deployed far faster than ever before.

“In the old days, when you released a patch, teams had a week or two to apply it,” he said. “Now, we need to get it done in minutes.”

Both executives were asked about a potential executive order that would create an FDA-style approval process for new AI models. Amodei was sharp and clear in his skepticism.

“The FDA slows down medical progress a great deal,” he said. “That’s a cautionary tale for AI regulation.”

He suggested the auto industry — where innovation is allowed but safety standards are mandatory — would be a better model, implicitly arguing AI needs its own version of seat belt laws, crash testing, traffic rules, and similar guardrails.

Dimon, who has spent decades navigating financial regulation, was characteristically blunt about government overreach: “They can help us best by not overburdening us, when we already have eight regulators asking us the same damn questions every single day.”

What both men say they want is predictability: a consistent, streamlined process that applies equally to all companies, lets commercial AI releases continue on a monthly cycle, and only targets the most serious risks. What they have right now, Amodei said, is “a bit of an ad hoc process, something that looks almost like regulation but lacks consistency.”

The Bigger Evasion

The cybersecurity exchange was a preview of a pattern that held throughout the entire conversation. When asked whether AI could trigger the 20%-30% unemployment some economists have projected, both men were far less definitive than Amodei himself was in 2025, when he stated half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear.

“Whenever people post clips of these talks on Twitter, they only cut the part where you say the most salacious, attention-grabbing thing,” Amodei said.

Dimon was more optimistic, invoking historical precedent from agriculture to electricity to the internet — but added a caveat that undercut his reassurance: “My view of life is that we don’t really know how quickly these changes are going to unfold.”

For two of the most influential figures at the intersection of AI and global finance, that may have been the most honest thing either of them said all day.