Bundesbank Warns Anthropic's Mythos Model Could Expose Weak Spots in European Banking Systems

Gate News message, April 21 — Germany’s Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel warned on Tuesday that Anthropic’s Mythos AI model poses significant cybersecurity risks to European financial institutions and called for broader access to the technology. Nagel, also a member of the European Central Bank Governing Council, said European companies and regulators should be allowed to test Mythos on equal terms with major U.S. firms to assess both opportunities and risks.

Nagel described Mythos as capable of quickly identifying and exploiting security vulnerabilities in financial software. “The use of AI in the financial sector opens the door to new and sophisticated cyber risks, since autonomous AI agents could exhibit harmful behaviour,” he said. He emphasized that all relevant institutions must have access to such technology to prevent competitive distortions and that Europe must prevent misuse of the model while leveraging it to strengthen digital defenses.

The warning underscores Europe’s growing concerns about its AI competitiveness gap. Nagel noted that in 2024, U.S. institutions built 40 advanced AI models compared to just 3 in Europe and 15 in China. Private AI investment in the U.S. reached $109.1 billion versus $19.4 billion in Europe and $9.3 billion in China. Government AI spending also favored the U.S. ($3.3 billion) and Europe ($1.2 billion) over China, which compensated with heavy state support of approximately $62 billion.

Meanwhile, Anthropic announced yesterday a deepened partnership with Amazon, committing over $100 billion over the next decade to AWS technologies. The deal secures up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for Claude training and deployment, with major Trainium2 capacity coming online in Q2 2026 and scaled Trainium3 capacity expected later this year. Anthropic currently operates over one million Trainium2 chips and serves more than 100,000 customers through Amazon Bedrock.