Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey told the BBC the development had to be taken very seriously: “We are having to look very carefully now what this latest AI development could mean for the risk of cyber crime.”
He added: “The consequence could be that there is a development of AI, of modelling, which makes it easier to detect existing vulnerabilities in sort of core IT systems, and then obviously cyber criminals – the bad actors – could seek to exploit them.”
The US Treasury confirmed it had raised the issue with its major banks encouraging them to test out their systems, before any public release of Mythos by Anthropic.
Financial industry sources indicated that another prominent US AI company could soon release a similarly powerful model but without the same safeguards.
James Wise, a partner at Balderton Capital, is chair of the Sovereign AI unit, a venture capital fund that will invest in British AI companies, backed by £500m of government funding.
He said Mythos is “the first of what will be many more powerful models” that can expose systems’ vulnerabilities.
His unit is “investing in British AI companies that are tackling that – companies working in AI security and safety”, he told the BBC’s Today Programme.
“We hope the models that expose vulnerabilities are also the models which will fix them.”
