FRANKFURT, May 12 (Reuters) - Germany's banking regulator BaFin warned on Tuesday that cyber risks were "growing" and "substantial" due to advances in artificial intelligence, and announced a new division will conduct targeted inspections at financial firms.
The emergence of Anthropic's Mythos has set up a scramble from the global banking industry to gain access and test the technology as regulators rush to examine the cybersecurity risks the new artificial intelligence model raises and how prepared financial firms are to tackle them.
"These new AI models can identify many vulnerabilities in both new and existing IT systems with remarkable speed," said BaFin President Mark Branson.
"They will be able to exploit the vulnerabilities they find ever more rapidly."
Branson said that the financial industry could afford to strengthen cybersecurity, calling it "an urgent and essential investment".
Mythos is viewed by cybersecurity experts as posing significant challenges to the banking industry and its legacy technology systems, prompting a series of warnings from regulators and policymakers. A string of U.S. banks have so far been given access to Mythos.
Branson said that a new division will make targeted inspections of financial firms.
"Such 'IT spotlight' inspections take far less time than fully-fledged reviews. We can therefore complete more of them and thus respond more effectively to current developments and incidents," he said.
(Reporting by Tom Sims; Editing by Linda Pasquini)
