Bessent Warns of Threat of AI-Powered Bank Account Hacks

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says American banks are working to safeguard against AI-related cyberthreats.

Bessent addressed the issue Sunday (May 3) in an interview with Fox News, coming in the wake of a meeting he and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell held with Wall Street executives on concerns related to Anthropic’s Mythos artificial intelligence model.

At the meeting, the officials told banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America that they should take the Mythos model seriously and use it to find holes in their defenses.

“What we’ve had in the past month was a step change in the power of one large language model, but we’re going to see it from the other AI companies, and it’s important that the U.S. stays ahead here,” Bessent said.

That means figuring out a “very important calculus” between safety and innovation, he added, without mentioning any specific measures taken by banks or the government.

Asked by Fox’s Maria Bartiromo if Americans need to be worried about AI hacking into their bank accounts, Bessent responded with “You should.”

Anthropic has said Mythos has discovered thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including flaws in major operating systems and web browsers. It has led to concerns among businesses and governments around the world about the possibility of AI-powered cyberattacks.

“The implications are two-sided,” PYMNTS wrote. “On one hand, defenders such as banks, payment processors and infrastructure providers can use these tools to identify and patch weaknesses. On the other, the same capabilities could be leveraged by hackers, dramatically accelerating the discovery and exploitation of systemic flaws across the financial ecosystem.”

And as covered here in an additional report, the newest models from AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic could mark a crucial inflection point in the cybersecurity space.

“AI is no longer just a tool in the hands of an attacker; it is beginning to replicate aspects of the attacker itself,” that report said.

For both finance chiefs and information security executives, the implication is growing stark, the report continued, with cybersecurity risk moving from a targeted phenomenon to something more along the lines of ambient exposure.

“Organizations are not just selected; they are continuously scanned, probed and tested by systems operating at scale,” PYMNTS added.

“The median enterprise, the one with uneven patching, over-permissioned accounts, and inconsistent configuration management, is now more accessible to multistep intrusion attempts that can be executed, or at least orchestrated, by AI systems.”