Anthropic PBC’s new artificial intelligence model Mythos could put traders and the broader financial system at risk through a Securities and Exchange Commission database, the American Securities Association said Thursday.
The financial-industry trade group warned of the potential for bad actors to target the so-called Consolidated Audit Trail with AI tools and conduct mass identity theft, expose individuals’ trading portfolios and amplify insider threats. The group has long been a foe of the controversial market-tracking database.
“The CAT was not designed to withstand the threat environment that Anthropic’s Mythos has now made real,” ASA President Chris Iacovella wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who also serves as chairman of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.
The ASA asked Bessent to immediately suspend collection of retail traders’ personal identity information in the database. The group also called to destroy personal trading data the CAT has collected, which the SEC has used in the past to conduct market surveillance and investigations into suspicious trades.
A spokesperson for the Treasury Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Related: Bessent, Powell Warned Bank CEOs About Anthropic Model Risks, Sources Say
“The concern isn’t just personal identity data,” said Sultan Meghji, former chief innovation officer at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. who now serves as chief executive officer of Frontier Foundry, an AI company. Even de-identified CAT data is a strategic asset and AI “has changed the economics of exploiting it,” he said.
The former FDIC official added that what once took a nation-state team can be done with a laptop and open-source tools.
“Mythos and systems like it push that further, enabling synthesis and misuse of decades of market data at industrial scale,” Meghji said.
Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell met with the heads of Wall Street’s top banks to discuss Mythos’ capabilities and potential impact, Bloomberg reported last week. The ASA said that meeting shows the CAT “is a significant cybersecurity vulnerability waiting to be exploited.”
The ASA and Citadel Securities won a lawsuit last year challenging the CAT’s funding structure, which had required exchanges to pay to support it. The SEC has since moved to reduce the operating costs of the CAT and the White House recently completed a review of an agency measure to consider overhauling the scope of data collected.
The ASA’s letter comes the same day the SEC sought public input on potential changes to the CAT, with Chairman Paul Atkins saying the agency must do more to reform the market-tracking system.
“The concept release seeks comment on foundational and existential aspects of the CAT,” Atkins said in a statement.
Photo: The Anthropic logo. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
Copyright 2026 Bloomberg.
The most important insurance news,in your inbox every business day.
Get the insurance industry’s trusted newsletter
