The meeting, organized by ECB Vice-President Frank Elderson, responsible for supervisory matters, was attended by “more than 300 participants from industry, the public sector, and representative associations… to share experience, exchange information, and discuss common challenges,” AFP reported, citing a source familiar with the agenda.
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The purpose of the meeting was to support the “preparation of action plans,” the source said, adding that information exchange is also planned for the future.
European governments and businesses are particularly concerned about the “Mythos” AI model, which “Anthropic” keeps hidden from the public due to its allegedly unparalleled ability to identify and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities even in trusted IT systems.
Last month, Anthropic announced it had granted up to 40 of the largest technology companies access to Mythos so they could identify and fix their weaknesses earlier. However, it only provided this access to US companies and government agencies, leaving European companies in the dark about the tool’s capabilities and the actions they may need to take.
As increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks against banks grow, the ECB wants to find out how resilient they can be to attacks using AI.
“This is an urgent situation. We are not dealing with a distant scenario,” Elderson said in an interview published on the ECB website.
He stated that “there are at least three ways in which Mythos is significantly more advanced than existing tools.”
One of them is Mythos’s ability to “detect and exploit vulnerabilities at a speed and scale far exceeding what we have seen before.”
Another is how it can leverage minor vulnerabilities and turn them into “serious attacks that previously could only be carried out by expert teams working for several days.”
Third, according to him, “it can trace software patch vulnerabilities through reverse engineering at an unprecedented speed, conducting attacks in hours or even faster that previously took weeks.”
“Unfortunately, euro area banks currently do not have access to Mythos. It is only available to a limited number of organizations in the United States,” an ECB spokesperson said.
The ECB supervises the 111 largest euro area banks, including subsidiaries of large US banks such as JPMorgan Chase, which have been granted access to Mythos.
US authorities also view Mythos’s capabilities with considerable suspicion, so last month the Treasury Department and the central bank (FED) convened a meeting of major US banks to assess the cybersecurity challenges posed by this AI model.
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