By William Schomberg and Andy Bruce
April 14 (Reuters) – Central banks and financial regulators must quickly understand the implications of a new artificial intelligence model that could pose major cybersecurity dangers, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said on Tuesday.
“It would be reasonable to think that the events in the Gulf are the most recent challenge to us in this world, until, I think it was last Friday, you wake up to find that Anthropic may have found a way to crack the whole cyber risk world open,” Bailey said at an event at Columbia University in New York.
Anthropic’s Mythos product has drawn warnings from cyber experts about its potential to supercharge complex cyberattacks, which could challenge the banking industry and its existing technology systems.
Regulators wanted to “work out what this actually means,” Bailey said. “The issue is: to what extent is this new version of the product going to be able to, in a sense, identify vulnerabilities in other systems which can be exploited for cyberattack purposes.”
He said cyber risks had risen up the list of concerns of regulators most rapidly in recent years.
“It’s the one that never goes away. You have to keep mitigating it, but the threat actors will move on, so we have to deal with it,” Bailey said.
He dedicated most of Tuesday’s event to discussing the issue of central banks’ operational independence, which was “not robust enough” when it came to matters of financial stability.
Bailey argued that monetary and financial stability policy – often depicted as separate issues or sometimes even at odds with each other – should be viewed together within an overarching objective of protecting the value of money.
While monetary policy is defined by numerical inflation targets, financial stability is harder to grasp, leading to a distinction between the two, Bailey said.
“This is important because independence in respect of financial stability is otherwise not as robust, and I would argue not robust enough,” Bailey said in his speech.
His remarks come as central banks on both sides of the Atlantic face increasing levels of political pressure, albeit to differing degrees.
In the United States, U.S. President Donald Trump has called for lower interest rates and has repeatedly chastised Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
In Britain, finance minister Rachel Reeves has pushed regulators including the BoE to give greater weight to economic growth when making decisions.
Bailey said financial stability cuts across private interests in the financial system, as well as governments seeking to boost economic growth by loosening regulation to increase lending – particularly when memories of past crises fade.
Much as monetary policy aims to protect the real value of money, Bailey said financial stability policy protects trust in money and that the two should be seen as complementary.
“I see merit in creating a single overarching narrative with a strong focus on the value of money. It would remove descriptions of financial stability such as ‘tangential’ or ‘in conflict’,” Bailey said.
(Additional reporting by Suban Abdulla; Editing by Andrea Ricci )
