By Francesco Canepa
FRANKFURT, April 15 (Reuters) – European Central Bank supervisors are set to quiz bankers about the risks that Anthropic’s new artificial intelligence model might supercharge cyberattacks, one source familiar with the situation told Reuters on Wednesday.
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 U.S.
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 U.S., this effort will be carried out 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 aspect 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 organizations, to privately evaluate the model and prepare defences accordingly.
TRUMP BACKS AI SAFEGUARDS IN BANKING SYSTEM
U.S. 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. Trump also backed government safeguards.
St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem told Reuters the development emphasized the need for the U.S. central bank to “revisit how we’re thinking about cybersecurity” and to check in with banks about their own “resilience and robustness to cyber risk in this new world.”
“Our cyber teams are engaged with the substance of it, not the news of it, but the actual substance of it. And we’re evaluating,” Musalem told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
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 is “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 that central banks and financial regulators must quickly understand the implications of the new model.
In Canada, Mythos was discussed at a meeting last Friday about cybersecurity attended by representatives of the Finance Ministry and the Bank of Canada as well as bank executives, a ministry spokesperson said.
The ECB already had listed tech risk as one of its top priorities for the 2026-2028 period.
(Reporting by Francesco Canepa; Additional reporting by Paul Sandle in London, Howard Schneider in Washington and Promit Mukherjee in Ottawa; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Paul Simao)
