Fifth Third Joins Anthropic’s Project Glasswing

Fifth Third Bancorp was invited to join Anthropic’s Project Glasswing cybersecurity initiative, Seeking Alpha reported Wednesday (June 10).

The bank’s chief financial officer, Bryan Preston, said at the Morgan Stanley U.S. Financials Conference that Fifth Third was granted access to the initiative within the past several weeks, according to the report.

“We think it was a reflection of just the role we play in the payments ecosystem in the country today, whether it’s the Direct Express business, some of the processing that we do for U.S. Customs as well as just the magnitude of payroll processing that we do for the country,” Preston said, per the report.

Direct Express is the U.S. Treasury Department’s prepaid debit card program that helps Americans get monthly federal benefits. Fifth Third Bank was selected by the Treasury Department to expand the program, and the bank inked a five-year agreement to serve as the financial agent for the program in September, PYMNTS reported at the time.

Anthropic introduced Project Glasswing in April when it announced the limited release of its first Mythos-class AI model, Claude Mythos Preview. The company said the initiative would offer select partners early access to the model so they could use the model’s cybersecurity capabilities to strengthen their systems before this class of models was more widely released.

By May 22, Anthropic reported that Claude Mythos Preview had identified more than 10,000 cybersecurity vulnerabilities in “the most systemically important software in the world” so that they could be patched.

On June 2, Anthropic said it was expanding Project Glasswing. The company said that the cybersecurity effort initially gave around 50 organizations access to Claude Mythos Preview and that it was being expanded to include 150 organizations.

When Anthropic announced Tuesday (June 9) that it launched two Mythos-class models after developing safeguards to prevent them from being misused, the company said that one of them, Claude Mythos 5, would initially be released only through Project Glasswing in collaboration with the U.S. government.

Fifth Third said Feb. 2 that it became the ninth-largest U.S. bank by assets that day when the merger between Fifth Third Bancorp and Comerica closed.