Govt Forms Panel Under SBI Chief Setty To Assess Mythos-Related Risks

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday said the government has formed a panel under SBI Chairman C S Setty, who also leads the industry grouping IBA, to assess risks emanating from AI platform Mythos and come up with mitigating measures.

There will be a lot of interaction among banks over the next few weeks to understand the threats and also look at the areas where additional investments will be required, Sitharaman said on the sidelines of an event to inaugurate SBI's newly created local head office here.

"In the coming weeks, there will be a lot of interaction within the banks, understanding where more investments will have to be made, what kind of technologies can come in, how AI itself can be used for countering this AI born challenge," Sitharaman said.

The government had held a high-level meeting with banks on Thursday, that was also attended by IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav, Sitharaman, and other top officials.

Sitharaman said not much is known about Mythos yet and there are very few people who have tried the system, which is speculated to bring about radical changes in computing.

She said all this while, the system has been able to protect customers but the same record may not be sufficient to guard against newer platforms.

The Meity is speaking with various governments and also technology companies to understand the issue, the FM said.

Anthropic's AI model Mythos has raised a global debate over vulnerability in the financial system as the model has the capability to find weaknesses in their operating system and launch a potential cyber attack.

Mythos' advanced coding capabilities give it an unprecedented potential to detect cybersecurity weaknesses and develop methods to exploit them, sparking concerns that it could be used to disrupt banking systems.

Regulators across Asia, Europe, and the US have already warned banks to review their defences and preparedness.

Mythos has raised alarm bells among regulators, who see it as a significant challenge to the banking sector and its legacy technology systems.

Banks and financial institutions are most vulnerable as there is high interconnected (payments, markets, clearing systems) and dependence on legacy IT systems operating in real-time.

One successful cyberattack can cascade quickly across institutions and markets as one bank is linked to many domestic and global institution for inward and outward payment, forex trading, money market exposure, stock market linkage, depositories and payment gateway, etc.