AI just made every American investor a national security target
by Christopher A. Iacovella · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently summoned Wall Street’s top CEOs to an emergency meeting for one reason: Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview has made our financial system vulnerable in ways Washington is unprepared to address.
Still, they missed the most vulnerable target of all: a little-known government database that has become the world’s largest collection of retail investor financial information ever assembled.
Most Americans have never heard of the Consolidated Audit Trail. That is about to change.
Here is what the audit trail contains: the name, address, birth year and trade-by-trade history of every retail brokerage customer in America. Every buy and sell order, every account, every investor — all mapped to a single government-assigned ID.
The Consolidated Audit Trail effectively places every American saver under continuous financial observation. It is the digital equivalent of forcing citizens to wear a government tracking device — not for any crime or misconduct, but merely for daring to invest in their futures.
Now consider what Mythos can do. Anthropic’s own Frontier Red Team documented thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities, previously unknown flaws with no existing patch or defense, autonomously identified and exploited across every major operating system and web browser.
The team uncovered a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD, used to run critical financial firewalls, and a 16-year-old bug that had survived 5 million automated scans. In one test, it chained together four vulnerabilities to escape a browser sandbox without any human intervention.
Anthropic’s researchers documented a 72% success rate in generating working exploits. Zero-days are the most dangerous class of vulnerability in existence, and Mythos finds them by the thousands.
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This is the threat environment confronting the Consolidated Audit Trail database and the American investors whose information it holds. The existing security framework was not designed to withstand this level of sophistication.
The American Securities Association, which I lead, has warned about this for years. We have called the audit trail an unconstitutional invasion of investor privacy. We have warned that concentrating every American investor’s personal and financial information in a single government-mandated database was an unconscionable risk.
We filed lawsuits, and the regulators’ response was, in essence: “Your concerns are overstated.”
Recent events have proved otherwise.
A successful Mythos-class attack on the Consolidated Audit Trail wouldn’t just expose every retail brokerage account in America to identity theft. It also would hand a foreign adversary a precise map of American market positioning, which could be exploited at a moment of their choosing to cause maximum economic damage.
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For China or Russia, that is not a hypothetical. It is an operational capability that would transform a cybersecurity breach into a devastating act of economic warfare.
The Treasury Department’s Financial Stability Oversight Council now has a clear choice. It can acknowledge that the same artificial intelligence capabilities that prompted an emergency meeting of Wall Street’s most powerful executives apply with equal or greater force to the most concentrated repository of retail investor data ever created, or it can wait until it’s too late.
The oversight council should immediately suspend the collection and use of retail investor information by the Consolidated Audit Trail, conduct an independent cybersecurity audit against a Mythos-class threat model and replace bulk data collection with a secure, decentralized, respond-and-request-based alternative.
The storm Anthropic warned about is not on the horizon. It is here, and the only question is whether Washington will act before American investors pay the price.
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• Christopher A. Iacovella is the president and chief executive officer of the American Securities Association.