European finance ministers are pressing Anthropic PBC to let local companies see the new Mythos AI model so they aren’t exposed to digital attacks and fall behind US peers.
"We need to have a response from Europe,” Carlos Cuerpo, Spain’s economy minister, told reporters Monday before a meeting of Eurogroup finance ministers in Brussels. The bloc, he said, must determine how "we can defend ourselves, ensure our companies have access to these models, and can protect themselves against what may come.”
Ministers will discuss the subject, as concerns mount over unprecedented digital attacks should the artificial intelligence-model fall into the wrong hands. But so far, European companies have not been granted access to Mythos, leaving them unable to judge the unreleased tool’s potential impact.
Cuerpo warned that Mythos and other new models may be able "to find vulnerabilities or backdoors in virtually all our institutions – not only in the financial sector and companies, but across all sectors.”
In response, he pushed for Europe to consider "regulatory and legislative instruments such as the AI Act” – the bloc’s legal framework for AI development.
In the meeting itself, Cuerpo reinforced that stance, according to people familiar with the discussions. Eurogroup President Kyriakos Pierrakakis acknowledged that the issue is so serious that ministers will need to revisit the topic at future gatherings, they said.
Finance ministers also made a plea for more reliable information, with officials bemoaning that Europeans are currently assessing the risk based on rumours, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as the talks are private.
Speaking before the European Parliament’s economic committee, European Central Bank Vice President Luis de Guindos emphasised the need to preemptively shield the continent’s payment systems from any digital vulnerabilities that Mythos may expose.
These technologies "should be focused on identifying the flaws of your operating systems,” he said. But if bad actors gain access to these weaknesses, he added, it "can give rise to a lot of problems.”
Mythos was also a prominent topic of conversation at the recent International Monetary Fund spring meetings in Washington. The White House opposes plans to make the tool available for more companies and organisations, Bloomberg previously reported.
"AI poses a significant opportunity, productivity wise, economic growth wise in our economic systems, but it also has its security challenges,” Pierrakakis told reporters on Monday. – Bloomberg
