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

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 challengeto 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 sidelinesof 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)