Financial Officials Sound Alarm About Anthropic’s Banking Risk

A new warning from top financial officials is pushing AI risk to the center of the global banking conversation. At this week’s IMF and World Bank spring meetings in Washington, regulators and central bankers focused on Anthropic’s new Claude Mythos Preview model and the possibility that advanced large language models could expose weak spots in banks’ cyber defenses. According to the Financial Times, the concern is no longer theoretical. Officials are treating it as an urgent financial stability issue.

The FT reports that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, who chairs the Financial Stability Board, called the issue “a very serious challenge for all of us” and said regulators need to move quickly to assess the threat. The core fear is that models such as Mythos may be able to identify and chain together software vulnerabilities at a speed and scale beyond human capability, shifting the balance between attackers and defenders.

Anthropic said earlier this month that Mythos had found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including flaws in major operating systems and web browsers. So far, the company has reportedly limited access to about 40 companies, including Amazon, Apple and J.P. Morgan Chase, so they can test the model and address weaknesses in their systems.

The FT’s broader take is that this is becoming a governance story as much as a technology story. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, told Bloomberg TV, as quoted by the FT, that there is no framework in place “to actually mind those things.” That captures the tension running through the article. Policymakers do not want to slow a technology with major economic upside, but they also do not want regulation to arrive only after the damage is done. The FT also notes that some officials doubt a coordinated global response will come easily, given geopolitical strains and uneven access to the new model outside the U.S.

Recent PYMNTS coverage of Anthropic has tracked that same push and pull. PYMNTS reported that the Treasury Department wants access to Anthropic’s Mythos, a sign that U.S. officials want a closer look at how the model works and what vulnerabilities it can uncover. PYMNTS also reported that Anthropic is ready to offer Mythos to British banks and that the Bank of England is probing AI threats to U.K. financial stability. At the same time, PYMNTS has covered Anthropic’s commercial momentum, including how the company hit a $30 billion run rate as enterprise demand accelerated.

Together, those stories show the split-screen reality around Anthropic right now. The company is gaining traction fast in the enterprise market even as regulators and banks scramble to understand the risks that come with more powerful AI tools.