Mistral Plans Cybersecurity Tool for Banks Cut off From Mythos

French AI startup Mistral is reportedly working on an alternative to Anthropic’s Mythos.

As Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (May 13), the company is in talks with banks in Europe about an answer to the American artificial intelligence (AI) model, which is said to be able to find cybersecurity weaknesses at unheard of scale and speeds.

Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Mistral has been working on the model, though it’s not clear when it will debut. The report notes that Europe’s banks are facing increased pressure to find and fix cyber vulnerabilities, but find themselves at a disadvantage given their lack of access to Mythos.

Mistral was already working with its banking clients on using AI to identify security flaws before the release of Mythos, but is now at work on an off-the-shelf iteration of a product it can roll out more widely, one of the sources said.

The report points out that Anthropic’s decision to limit access to Mythos has triggered alarm around the world about AI’s ability to make it past cyber defenses, as well as a race among other companies to develop similarly powerful tools.

Only a handful of organizations — including banks, cybersecurity firms and tech companies — have been granted access to Mythos. As Bloomberg wrote, early analysis indicates that the model could carry out autonomous attacks.

News about Mistral’s project comes on the heels of OpenAI’s announcement of Daybreak, a tool designed, as CEO Sam Altman put it, to boost security and “continuously secure software.”

“AI is already good and about to get super good at cybersecurity; we’d like to start working with as many companies as possible now to help them continuously secure themselves,” Altman wrote on social media platform X.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about “the industrialization of hacking” after Google reported it had seen what it believes to be the first observed case of an AI-developed zero-day exploit tied to a planned mass exploitation campaign.

The main takeaway for businesses is that the “tool kit of hacking tasks” for fraudsters, including reconnaissance, exploit adaptation, vulnerability discovery and social engineering, no longer requires the same level of human expertise.

“On top of that, they are all becoming increasingly automatable,” PYMNTS added. “This first-principles shift matters because cybersecurity is ultimately an economic system. And economic systems change rapidly when the cost of production collapses.”