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Top international financial officials have sounded an alarm over the latest artificial intelligence (AI) models developed by the US tech companies, warning they could expose dangerous weaknesses in the global banking system’s cyber defences, a report has said.
The warning came as finance ministers, central bankers and regulators gathered in Washington this week for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank spring meetings during which concerns over a new AI model developed by San Francisco-based start-up Anthropic became a central talking point.
AI in global banking takes centre stage
The threat posed by advanced AI to global banking dominated conversations at the meeting, according to a report by The Financial Times.“The evolution of digital technology is posing immense risks from a cyber security perspective. This is really going to be absolutely essential on the international agenda for the next few months,” said Dan Katz, deputy head of the IMF and former chief of staff to US Treasury Secretary Scott BessentAndrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England and chair of the Financial Stability Board, echoed Katz’s words.“It is a very serious challenge for all of us. It reminds us how fast the AI world moves,” he said, adding that the speed of AI development was striking.
Bailey said regulators around the world would need to urgently assess the potential cyber security risks posed by Anthropic’s new model, Claude Mythos Preview.
‘A double-edged sword’
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde made a pointed observation. “The development we’ve seen with Anthropic and Mythos is a good example of a responsible company that is suddenly thinking, ‘ah, that could be really good’ — but if it falls in the wrong hands, it could be really bad,” she said.Lagarde stressed the urgent need for a proper governance framework, telling Bloomberg TV: “I don’t think there is a governance framework that is there to actually mind those things. We need to work on that.”
What makes Anthropic’s Claude Mythos so ‘alarming’
Earlier this month, Anthropic said that Mythos had “found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.” The company warned it would “not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely,” adding that the consequences for economies, public safety and national security “could be severe.
”So far, Anthropic has shared the model with only around 40 selected companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google and JPMorgan Chase, providing an early opportunity to test the technology and begin patching vulnerabilities it uncovers in their systems.
