×

Mythos a serious threat but more will follow, Barclays CEO says

By Thomson Reuters Apr 17, 2026 | 3:40 PM

WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) – Anthropic’s frontier AI model Mythos is a serious threat to the global banking system, and it ​is likely to be followed by ‌similar, even more powerful cyberthreats, Barclays Chief Executive C. S. Venkatakrishnan said on Friday.

The vast capabilities of Mythos to code at a high level have given ‌it ​a potentially unprecedented ability ⁠to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities ⁠and devise ways to exploit them, raising fears it could be exploited to destabilise banks.

This has forced regulators and supervisors into a ​scramble, and selected organisations are now reviewing the model to gauge the actual ⁠cybersecurity risk. Mythos has raised ⁠alarm bells among regulators, who ​see it as a significant challenge to the banking ​sector and its legacy technology systems.

“On Mythos, ‌look, it’s a serious issue,” he told a meeting of the G30 consultancy group on the sidelines of the IMF’s spring meeting.

“But here’s ⁠the thing: there will be a Mythos 2 and a Mythos 3, and they’ll come up with ⁠probably distressing ‌frequency,” he said.

Such technological leaps will ⁠accelerate an arms race that forces ​lenders ‌to innovate, and may be ​especially challenging ⁠for older and larger institutions potentially running legacy systems, Venkatakrishnan said.

“We have to understand its capabilities and we have to understand how to safeguard against it.”

(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; editing by ​David Gaffen)