By Sophia Cai, John Sakellariadis, Michael Stratford, Cheyenne Haslett | 05/22/2026 06:57 AM EDT
The administration’s early response to Mythos sparked a turf clash, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressing that a top White House cyber official was not moving quickly enough.
Sean Cairncross, White House national cyber director, at the Semafor World Economy event in Washington on April 15. Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has privately expressed alarm about the slow pace of progress on AI policy, even before the White House again delayed an executive order on the subject Thursday.
The drafting of the executive order has exposed tensions between Bessent, who has taken on an outsize role in the policy’s creation, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, according to a senior White House official, another senior U.S. official and two other people familiar with the dynamics. They, like some others in this report, were granted anonymity to speak freely about a closely held policy.
Bessent was displeased in the early stages of the policymaking process with the pace of the administration’s response to Anthropic’s advanced AI model, Mythos, as he and Cairncross disagreed over their respective lanes, the senior White House official and the two people said.
Specifically, he was concerned Cairncross was not moving swiftly enough to address potential risks to critical infrastructure and the financial system, according to the senior U.S. official and the two people, as well as another administration official. The arrival of Anthropic’s Mythos accelerated those concerns and complicated an already fraught policy debate inside the government.