ECB presses banks on AI defence plans

The European Central Bank on Tuesday pressed major European banks to come up with action plans to deal with cybersecurity risks posed by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems.

The emergence of AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos, which is especially good at finding weaknesses in computer systems, has caused alarm among European governments and policymakers.

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The ECB’s supervisory board sent a letter to the 110 institutions that it oversees, arguing that new AI models represent a “long-term shift in the threat landscape rather than a temporary phenomenon”.

“While these developments do not introduce entirely new risks, they significantly amplify the speed and scale at which such risks materialise,” wrote Claudia Buch, head of the supervisory board.

The ECB is asking major institutions, from Deutsche Bank to BNP Paribas and Santander, to submit by October 31 a plan detailing the immediate and longer-term measures they intend to take to strengthen their resilience to cyberattacks.

These efforts must be directed from the highest levels of the lenders, the ECB stressed.

“Responsibility for responding to the evolving cyber-risk environment primarily lies with banks’ management bodies,” Buch wrote.

The push from the supervisory board comes alongside a warning from a European body monitoring systemic risks on the growing threat of “systemic cyber risks stemming from frontier artificial intelligence models”.

“Advanced AI models were already being used “by malicious actors to enhance cyber-attacks,” it warned.

Anthropic did not initially release the full version of Mythos models to the public, for fear they could be used by hackers. Last month, it released a public version with built-in safety filters.