Banks Face a Faster Cyber Clock as Gold Eagle Goes Live

The federal government’s artificial intelligence (AI) security initiative now has a name and a launch date. The White House launched Gold Eagle on Tuesday (July 14), a federal AI cybersecurity clearinghouse established by the Treasury Department with contributions from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Department of Defense. The platform is designed to consolidate vulnerability findings from government and critical infrastructure industries, prioritize the most consequential flaws and coordinate remediation before they are exploited, Nextgov reported.

The initiative is already receiving vulnerability reports and prioritizing patches. The White House did not name participating companies, describing them as “open-source software partners and American critical infrastructure companies.”

Gold Eagle was established under President Donald Trump’s June 2 executive order on AI innovation and security, which directs agencies to develop a voluntary framework under which AI developers may provide the government access to qualifying frontier models for up to 30 days before releasing them to other trusted partners, Nextgov reported. The framework’s detailed mechanics remain unfinished. The White House said frontier AI could help identify and patch vulnerabilities at a speed and scale not previously possible.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department will “continue to harness frontier AI capabilities to stay ahead of our adversaries,” the White House stated. Anthropic committed in a June 30 blog post to provide government partners with threat intelligence before publication and to participate in the clearinghouse.

AI Cuts the Time It Takes to Find and Exploit Vulnerabilities

Frontier AI models can discover vulnerabilities, generate working exploits and execute attacks faster and at greater scale than previous AI systems, the European Systemic Risk Board warned in a July 7 report on the risks of AI to financial institutions’ cyber defenses, PYMNTS reported. In the short to medium term, the ESRB said, frontier AI gives threat actors an advantage by enabling attacks with greater speed, scale and sophistication.

Finance and insurance made up 27% of global cyberattacks observed in 2025, according to IBM’s X-Force 2026 Threat Intelligence Index, as PYMNTS reported. “More is changing now and faster than we have seen in a long time, the time to find and exploit vulnerabilities is drastically decreasing,” Patrick Opet, chief information security officer at JPMorgan, told the Financial Times.

In November, Anthropic said it disrupted an AI-orchestrated cyberespionage campaign, in which a state-sponsored group manipulated Claude Code to target financial institutions, technology companies and government agencies. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recommended in its spring 2026 Semiannual Risk Perspective that banks implement multifactor authentication and timely patch management specifically to address AI-enabled cyber risks, PYMNTS reported.

Gold Eagle Is Designed to Reduce Duplicative Scanning and Speed Remediation

The executive order expressly identifies reducing duplicative vulnerability scanning as a goal of the clearinghouse. Rather than individual institutions independently finding and fixing the same flaws, Gold Eagle is intended to consolidate triage into one government and industry team. The initiative looks to address risks beyond vulnerabilities in AI systems. It also covers ordinary software vulnerabilities that AI tools can now discover faster than humans can patch them. When hackers compromised the Log4J logging tool in 2021, it required a multi-month effort by CISA and the private sector to find and fix every piece of affected software, CyberScoop noted. AI compresses the time between discovery and exploitation.

Michael Daniel, former White House cyber coordinator under President Obama, told CyberScoop the field is still learning what AI-specific threats require. “It may turn out at the end of the day that phishing is still phishing,” Daniel said. “Or there may be something fundamentally different about it that we need to figure out how to combat and share information around.”