Treasury Secretary Bessent Escalates AI Role After Payment System Warnings

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent moved to take a more active role in artificial intelligence policy earlier this year after financial institutions warned that advanced AI models could leave critical infrastructure vulnerable — including the Federal Reserve payment rails that enable banks to transfer funds, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The concerns centered on models like Anthropic's Mythos, which ramped up pressure on existing safeguards this spring. Banks have been collaborating with Treasury and the Fed for years to develop backup methods for transferring funds in the event of a potentially disastrous outage, but the emergence of more powerful AI systems accelerated those discussions.

Why it matters

The Federal Reserve's payment systems process hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions daily. Fedwire alone handled more than 54 million transfers totaling over $283 trillion in the first quarter of 2026 — an average of nearly 887,000 transfers per day, each averaging more than $5 million. A disruption to these systems could serve as a tripwire for the broader U.S. economy, and the lack of sufficient private-sector alternatives means there are few fallback options if something goes wrong.

From Hands-Off to Hands-On

Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, described himself as "one of the point people on our AI policy" during remarks at the Economic Club of New York this week. "AI is something that I think about every day at Treasury, because of AI, the financial system and our responsibility of guiding the American economy," he said.

In April, Bessent met with then-Fed Chair Jerome Powell and CEOs of systemically important banks to discuss the risks posed by Anthropic's Mythos model. Since then, he has helped steer the Trump administration away from a hands-off approach to AI regulation.

That shift resulted in an executive order establishing a voluntary review process for advanced models and giving Treasury ownership of a new cyber clearinghouse. The order's implementation could be delayed, however, as Anthropic is currently in talks with the administration on how to bring Mythos — and its consumer equivalent, Fable — back online after the Commerce Department imposed export controls over national security concerns.

Payment Rails at Risk

Federally and state-chartered financial institutions with master accounts at a Fed bank can use payment systems like Fedwire to send money instantly. Treasury itself uses the same method to transfer funds, as do a growing number of nonbanks — which banks have warned could also expose the systems to additional risk.

While a handful of private-sector alternatives exist, they lack the capacity to handle all transactions if a system like Fedwire goes offline. Bessent emphasized that Treasury is "trying to optimize a very difficult calculus, in terms of innovation and safety, to get the proper equilibrium to make sure that we can maintain our lead" over China.

Semafor first reported these details. Treasury and the Fed did not comment on the discussions.