Synopsis
As European Central Bank regulators delve into the potential risks posed by new artificial intelligence models, bankers will be put under the microscope. These advanced technologies carry the ominous possibility of escalating cyber threats, leaving cybersecurity specialists on high alert. Across the Atlantic, British and American regulators echo these concerns.Listen to this article in summarized format
Anthropic's Mythos is seen by cybersecurity experts as posing significant challenges to the banking industry and its legacy technology systems, raising alarm bells among regulators in Britain and the United States.
ECB supervisors are gathering information about the model, with a view to asking banks on their watch about their preparedness for this new possible source of risk, said the source who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to comment publicly on the matter.
Unlike in the US, this will be done via the ECB's regular dialogue with bank staff and no ad-hoc meeting with top management has been scheduled yet.
An ECB spokesperson declined to comment. Mythos' capabilities to code at a high level have given it a potentially unprecedented ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and devise ways to exploit them, experts told Reuters. This is why Anthropic has said the current iteration, Claude Mythos Preview, will not be made generally available.
Instead, the company announced Project Glasswing, in which it invited major tech companies, cybersecurity vendors and JPMorgan Chase, along with several dozen other organisations, to privately evaluate the model and prepare defences accordingly.
Trump backs AI safeguards in banking system
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent meeting with bank chief executives last week to warn them about the risks, which President Donald Trump acknowledged on Wednesday and backed government safeguards.
Britain's Technology Secretary Liz Kendall and Security Minister Dan Jarvis sounded a similar warning to businesses on Wednesday, saying Mythos was "substantially more capable at cyber offence" than any model previously tested by the government's AI Security Institute.
"A new generation of AI models are becoming capable of doing work that previously required rare expertise: finding weaknesses in software, writing the code to exploit them, and doing so at a speed and scale that would have been impossible even a year ago," they said in an open letter to businesses.
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said this week central banks and financial regulators must quickly understand the implications of the new model. The ECB had already listed tech risk as one of its top priorities for 2026-28.
