Australia regulator calls for urgent cybersecurity action to counter Mythos

Australia's corporate regulator has urged the country's financial sector to take urgent action to address potential cyber risks posed by frontier AI systems such as Mythos.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission on Friday published a letter sent to the financial services industry, saying greater action needs to be taken to ensure cybersecurity practices are as strong as possible.

"Cyber risk has entered a new era, the advent of frontier AI models creates opportunity but also materially increases risk, with the ability to expose vulnerabilities faster than many realise," Simone Constant, ASIC commissioner, said.

"Do not wait for perfect clarity to address the threat posed by new AI models. Instead, act now, and act with discipline, to strengthen the cyber resilience fundamentals that underpin your business."

Potential risks posed by Mythos, which has high-level coding capabilities, have given it a potentially unprecedented ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, experts have warned.

Anthropic, which developed Mythos, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on ASIC's letter.

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The ASIC warning follows Australia's banking regulator last month saying the domestic financial services industry's information security practices were struggling to match the rate of ​change in AI.

"The clock is at a minute to midnight – if you aren’t on top of your cyber resilience already, the time to act and prepare is right now," Constant said.

Anthropic has launched ​Claude Mythos Preview under Project Glasswing, a tightly restricted access programme that includes major ‌technology ⁠firms such as Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple.

The ability of central banks and financial regulators ‌to monitor and combat the risks posed by AI models has been called into question after a survey found that authorities significantly lag financial firms in AI adoption and lack data on emerging harms.

Financial institutions are adopting AI at more than twice the rate of ​their supervisors, with just two in 10 regulators reporting "advanced AI adoption", research published in April by the Cambridge Centre for ​Alternative Finance showed.