We Don’t Need to Wait for an AI Disaster to Estimate Its Costs

August 24, 2026, Paper: "In April, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and then–Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gathered leading banks to discuss the threats of Anthropic’s new AI model, Claude Mythos. It was a tacit admission: no one, in the public or private sector, is ready for what is coming. The Mythos announcement led top AI firms to attach tighter restrictions to their own models and prompted even relatively laissez-faire voices in the federal government and think tanks to begin considering preapproval regimes for frontier AI models. Wherever those debates go now, Mythos has change the game, bringing into sharp focus the vast potential scope and scale of catastrophic risks posed by AI—such as an AI-triggered financial meltdown, vast cybersecurity or infrastructure collapse, or enhanced terrorism risk. As a result, companies, the government, engineers, scholars, and all of society are beginning to look for a different set of institutions, whether in regulation or insurance, to manage the risks."