Why the world’s banks are so worried about Anthropic’s latest AI model
Why the world’s banks are so worried about Anthropic’s latest AI model
Publish Date: 2026-04-23 16:09:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
The legendary American bank robber Willie Sutton spent 40 years robbing banks because, as he claimed in his autobiography, he loved doing it. And when asked why he chose banks of all places to rob, he allegedly replied “Because that’s where the money is.”
Back in 2017, I wrote a book predicting it wasn’t just lovable rogues like Sutton who would soon be robbing banks, but artificial intelligence (AI).
That day, it appears, could now be about to arrive. Banks around the world are seriously worried cyber criminals will soon take advantage of the latest advances in AI to try to rob them.
The digital back door into the vault
The finance world’s concern rests on the impressive cyber capabilities of a product called “Mythos”. This is the latest and most capable AI model from Anthropic, the company behind the popular Claude chatbot.
As a member of the public, you can’t access or use this model – for now. That’s because Anthropic (and many others) believe Mythos is too capable to launch upon an unsuspecting world.
Internal testing of Mythos has uncovered thousands of severe security vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser.
Some of these vulnerabilities have gone undetected for decades. Many are what tech insiders call “zero day” vulnerabilities – attacks that are so dangerous that developers need to fix them in zero days’ time.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, which says its new model is too powerful to release to the public at this stage.
Markus Schreiber/AP
Not for public use
To counter this emerging threat, Anthropic has made the model available to a dozen partners of a defensive coalition that includes Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Apple, Cisco and the Linux Foundation.
The company has also committed US$100 million (about A$140 million) in usage credits and US$4 million (about A$5.6 million) in…
