As the Financial Times reports, UK regulators – including the Bank of England and the FCA – are urgently reviewing the potential risks posed by the latest AI model from Anthropic: the Claude Mythos Preview.
The situation is unprecedented, as the model is not just another chatbot for generating marketing content. Claude Mythos is being developed as part of the enigmatic ‘Project Glasswing’ initiative . According to Anthropic’s official communications, this is a controlled environment in which the model serves a defensive purpose. The problem is that the line between defence and attack in cyberspace is thinner than ever.
The manufacturer itself has admitted that Mythos has already identified thousands of critical vulnerabilities in operating systems and browsers. What is a breakthrough for security engineers is becoming a nightmare for guardians of the financial system. If the model can pinpoint vulnerabilities in global software with such ease, the critical IT infrastructure of major banks, insurers and stock exchanges could be up for grabs.
Concern is not just confined to the City of London. Across the ocean, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already convened a meeting with Wall Street giants to assess the cyber risks of developing such sophisticated models. The reaction of regulators suggests that we are standing on the threshold of a new era of risk management, where the biggest threat to banks is no longer bad loans, but artificial intelligence capable of autonomously detecting errors in the code on which the global circulation of money is based.
Over the next two weeks, representatives of the UK financial sector are to be instructed in detail by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). The message is clear for business leaders: it is time for IT security audits to stop being a formality and become a real battleground against a model that learns faster than any hacker. Project Glasswing was supposed to bring transparency, but for now it has cast a long shadow over confidence in the digital stability of the financial sector.
