BNP Paribas and Mistral Team to Prep for Mythos-Related Threats

French bank BNP Paribas has reportedly launched a cybersecurity collaboration with partners including AI startup Mistral.

As Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (May 26), the effort is to help prepare for cybersecurity threats from artificial intelligence (AI) models such as Anthropic’s Mythos.

“The focus has been a lot on ‘is Mythos accessible or not accessible?’ but let’s not forget there are other models from other firms that exist,” Marc Camus, BNP’s chief information officer, told reporters at a news conference in Paris.

The partnership comes as Mistral has been in talks with European banks about using its answer to Mythos, an AI model said to be able to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities at unprecedented levels. Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Mistral has been working on a cybersecurity-focused AI model of its own.

Anthropic rival OpenAI recently launched its “Daybreak”  initiative, designed to boost cyber defenses and, as CEO Sam Altman put it, “continuously secure software.”

As Bloomberg notes, the rise of Mythos has alarmed banks, with Anthropic warning when the model debuted in April that its roll out was a “watershed moment for security” because of its ability to uncover software security flaws.

The model is not yet widely available, with Anthropic first wanting to test its abilities with a small group of companies, chiefly based in the U.S., an effort known as Project Glasswing.

So far, Mythos has uncovered more than 10,000 “high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities” in some of the “most systemically important software in the world,” Anthropic said in a report on Glasswing issued over the weekend.

“Progress on software security used to be limited by how quickly we could find new vulnerabilities,” the report said. “Now it’s limited by how quickly we can verify, disclose, and patch the large numbers of vulnerabilities found by AI.”

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence and Trulioo shows that large enterprises are increasingly contending with AI-powered cyberattacks.

“Larger firms, with their larger footprints, can be more susceptible to the AI-powered spoofing of identity documents thanks to the industrialization of deepfakes and automated data scraping capabilities by adversarial cyber actors,” PYMNTS wrote last week.

The research found that a majority of surveyed companies (58%) with more than $1 billion in yearly revenue reported dealing with AI-generated documents or deepfake-related attacks in the prior year, a full 11 percentage points more than smaller businesses.