Mythos was critical to open-source cybersecurity push

International Business Machines CEO Arvind Krishna said Anthropic’s Mythos was pivotal in driving the company’s $5 billion investment into a new cybersecurity offering announced Thursday to address vulnerabilities in open-source software.

“Mythos was the critical triggering factor on this,” Krishna said in an exclusive interview with CNBC.

Open-source models are often used by companies because of the price and easy access. Red Hat is also part of the effort that is being dubbed Project Lightwell.

Major U.S. banks have already signed on to the project, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Bank of America all early adopters.

“They will use the latest tools to figure out where they might have a vulnerability and where there isn’t a patch that is already available,” Krishna said.

IBM shares climbed following the announcement.

The enterprise tech company is part of Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative that is previewing Anthropic’s Mythos ahead of a broader expected launch. Krishna noted that large language models generally are “remarkably adept at finding vulnerabilities” and exploiting issues in proprietary and open-source code.

Despite multiple meetings to discuss a path forward, leaders have yet to announce a cohesive strategy on how to respond to the cyber threats posed by Anthropic’s latest model.

As part of its open-source push, IBM and Red Hat are dedicating 20,000 software engineers to help partners secure software. Krishna said he sees cybersecurity incumbents more as partners than competitors in the effort to patch vulnerabilities exposed by Mythos.

“They’re great at protecting the perimeter, they’re great at figuring out what’s going on, but they don’t do patching and they don’t do the protection of other software,” Krishna said. “So this, I think, is a great complement to what they do.”

RBC Capital analyst Matthew Swanson said in a note Thursday that IBM is one of the largest providers of open-source software and therefore has the “incentive to continue to protect the ecosystem.”

The stock got a 12% bump last week after the Trump administration announced a $1 billion investment to develop a hub for quantum chip manufacturing.

“We believe that having manufacturing capability in the country is extremely important for quantum and for national security. … If quantum becomes anywhere close to what I suspect it will by the early 2030s, we will need to expand that capacity by quite a bit,” Krishna said.