international business machine CEO Arvind Krishna said Anthropic’s Mythos is critical to driving the company’s $5 billion investment in new cybersecurity products announced Thursday to address vulnerabilities in open source software.
“Mythology was an important trigger for this,” Krishna said in an exclusive interview with CNBC.
Open source models are often used by businesses because of their price and ease of access. Red Hat is also participating in an initiative called Project Lightwell.
Major US banks have already signed on to the project, goldman sachs, morgan stanley, JP Morgan and bank of america Dear early adopters.
“They’re going to use the latest tools to figure out where the vulnerabilities are and where patches aren’t already available,” Krishna said.
IBM stock rose following the announcement.
The enterprise technology company is part of Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative previewing Anthropic’s Mythos ahead of its expected wide release. Krishna pointed out that large language models are generally “very adept at finding vulnerabilities” and exploiting problems in proprietary and open source code.
Despite multiple meetings to discuss the path forward, leaders have yet to release a cohesive strategy on how to respond to the cyberthreats posed by Anthropic’s latest models.
As part of our open source push, IBM and Red Hat are dedicating 20,000 software engineers to helping partners secure their software. Krishna said he views cybersecurity incumbents as partners rather than competitors in the effort to fix the vulnerabilities exposed by Mythos.
“They’re good at securing the perimeter, they’re good at knowing what’s going on, but they don’t patch or protect other software,” Krishna said. “So I think this is a great complement to what they do.”
RBC Capital analyst Matthew Swanson said in a note Thursday that because IBM is one of the largest providers of open source software, it has “an incentive to continue protecting its ecosystem.”
The stock rose 12% last week after the Trump administration announced a $1 billion investment to develop a quantum chip manufacturing site.
“We believe that having domestic manufacturing capacity is very important for both quantum and national security. … If quantum is going to get anywhere close to the levels that I estimate by the early 2030s, we’re going to need to expand that capacity considerably,” Krishna said.
IBM stock price chart from the beginning of the year to the present.
