Across the Atlantic, central banks and regulators are already testing how such technologies could affect financial stability.
Senior financial officials from major economies are raising alarms that the latest generation of AI models could pose significant risks to the global banking system by exposing vulnerabilities in cybersecurity defenses.
Some warnings emerged during the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meetings from April 13 to 18.
Finance ministers, central bankers, and regulators gathered in Washington to assess mounting economic and geopolitical challenges.
At the center of the discussions was a powerful new AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, developed by San Francisco-based startup Anthropic.
In an April 7 statement, the company said its Claude Mythos Preview model had identified “thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities … many of them critical” across major operating systems and web browsers.
The company emphasized that these findings demonstrate the dual-use nature of advanced AI, which can strengthen defenses while also potentially enabling malicious actors.
Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, speaking on April 14 at Columbia University in New York, described the rapid emergence of advanced AI capabilities as a turning point for financial risk.
“It would be reasonable to think that the events in the Gulf are the most recent challenge to us in this world, until, I think it was last Friday, you wake up to find that Anthropic may have found a way to crack the whole cyber risk world open,” Bailey said.
Bailey stressed that regulators must urgently assess what the technology means in practice.
“The issue is: to what extent is this new version of the product going to be able to, in a sense, identify vulnerabilities in other systems which can be exploited for cyberattack purposes,” he said.
Calling the issue persistent and evolving, Bailey added, “It’s the one that never goes away. You have to keep mitigating it, but the threat actors will move on, so we have to deal with it.”
