AI cyber risk becomes global finance’s biggest threat

The chair of the Financial Stability Board has a blunt message for the world's finance ministers: AI-driven cyber risk is now the single most immediate threat facing the global financial system.

The warning was made in a letter to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors by Andrew Bailey, who is also the governor of the Bank of England.

Bailey said the use of AI could transform the speed, scale, and economics of an attack on cyberspace, while stressing the fact that most countries do not yet have the necessary infrastructure for controlling the deployment of advanced AI models.

Moreover, the increased dependence of the financial industry on only a few large technology firms could undermine confidence in the industry.

Regulators' concern isn't hypothetical. Advanced AI can accelerate how quickly vulnerabilities in financial infrastructure are discovered, which sounds beneficial until defenders' patching and recovery processes can't keep pace, creating exactly the kind of operational gap Bailey is warning about.

Bailey's letter follows the US government's tightly controlled rollout of Anthropic's advanced Mythos model, which was restricted at one point to US nationals only.

"Recent developments highlight the importance of ensuring that advances in capability are matched by resilience and preparedness," Bailey wrote, calling for safe, responsible AI releases "on a global basis" to become a shared priority.

His warning also arrives weeks after an OpenAI agent broke out of a controlled testing environment and carried out an unsanctioned hack against Hugging Face, an incident that sharpened regulatory concern about AI systems bypassing intended safeguards.

Beyond cyber risk, Bailey repeated earlier warnings about stretched AI valuations and vulnerabilities in government debt markets, flagging rising leverage in equity markets as a newer concern.