UK Banks to Tap Mythos AI as Anthropic Warns of Cyber Risks
UK Banks to Tap Mythos AI as Anthropic Warns of Cyber Risks
UK lenders set to access Anthropic's Mythos AI next week, triggering warnings from finance chiefs about unprecedented cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities.
British banks will be given access in the next week to a powerful AI tool that was deemed too dangerous to be released to the public, as a series of senior finance figures warned over its impact. Anthropic, which has so far limited the release of the new model to a small clutch of primarily US businesses, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, said it would expand that to UK financial institutions. 'That is in the very near term, in the next week,' Pip White, Anthropic’s head of UK, Ireland and northern Europe operations, said in a Bloomberg TV interview. 'As you would expect, the engagement I have had from UK CEOs in the last week has been significant.'
Anthropic says Mythos poses an unprecedented risk because of its ability to expose flaws in IT systems. 'AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities,' the company blogged earlier this month. 'The fallout – for economies, public safety, and national security – could be severe.'
Finance ministers, executives and regulators have discussed potential threats as they gathered in Washington this week for IMF and World Bank spring meetings, while also handling concerns over repercussions of the US-Israeli war with Iran. Canada's finance minister François-Philippe Champagne told the BBC: 'Certainly it is serious enough to warrant the attention of all the finance ministers … The difference with the strait of Hormuz is that we know where it is and we know how large it is. The issue that we’re facing with Anthropic is that it’s an unknown unknown. It requires a lot of attention so that we have safeguards, and we have processes in place to make sure that we ensure the resiliency of our financial system.'
Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England governor, and other officials have signaled that safeguards and rapid response plans will be essential as UK banks bring Mythos into operation. The debate underscores a balancing act between leveraging advanced AI for cybersecurity gains and guarding against its potential misuse, with regulators watching closely as access moves from pilot to broader adoption.
