Epic halts development after Anthropic's AI found bugs exposing 320M patient records
What's the deal? EpicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the maker of the widely used MyChartDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → medical records software, has paused most product development to fix security flaws that could expose patients' data. Founder and chief executive Judy Faulkner told Modern Healthcare the pause would likely last six weeks while the company safeguards its products.
Why now? The flaws surfaced after Epic deployed Anthropic's cybersecurity model Mythos, which unearthed vulnerabilities in the software.
What's the risk? Epic's chief security officer Stirling Martin told The New York Times that some customer configurations of MyChart could let outsiders access patient records without logging any intrusion. Martin said the model did not confirm whether the bug could alter records undetected, but argued it posed enough risk to fix.
MyChart maintains more than 320 million patient records across US hospitals and doctors' offices. Epic says it does not hold customers' medical data — that falls to healthcare providers — but an unknown bug could let hackers compromise affected systems and raid the stored data.
What could go wrong? It is rare for a company to halt development to patch security bugs. But AI tools that can rapidly find and exploit vulnerabilities have raised fears that attackers could steal data more easily.
The signal: Healthcare breaches are mounting as hackers chase sensitive medical data they can ransom. A 2024 attack on UnitedHealthDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s Change Healthcare exposed data on more than 192 million people, with the company paying the hackers twice to stop publication. This year brought back-to-back breaches at CareCloud, McKessonDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and UK-based Craneware; a breach at dental insurer DentaQuest, affecting 15 million people, ranks as 2026's largest healthcare data breach so far, per the Department of Health and Human Services.
Read more: TechCrunch
Image credit: USDAgov
