The corporate regulator has raised alarm over Mythos and other advanced AI tools, as it urges insurers and other financial services providers to “act now” on stronger cybersecurity.

“We are not calling for panic or reactive overreach. But we are calling for urgency, focus and accountability,” the Australian Securities and Investments Commission says in a letter to financial services groups.

“The time to act is now … Frontier AI models are a step-change in capability … These models are accelerating both capability and accessibility, lowering the barrier to sophisticated cyber activity, increasing the speed and scale of attacks, and enabling new forms of exploitation that were previously out of reach for most actors.”

Concerns over digital security have intensified after tech group Anthropic announced last month that Mythos, its new artificial intelligence model, will not be released to the general public because it poses a cyber risk.

Anthropic says Mythos reveals “a stark fact … AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.

“Mythos has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely.”

ASIC says “misuse” of frontier AI models such as Mythos could expose cybersecurity vulnerabilities at an unprecedented speed and scale.

“Cyber risk has entered a new era,” ASIC commissioner Simone Constant said.

“The clock is at a minute to midnight – if you aren’t on top of your cyber resilience already, the time to act and prepare is right now.”

Click here to read the letter in full.

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