By Mathieu Rosemain
PARIS, May 26 (Reuters) – BNP Paribas is bolstering its cybersecurity defences in anticipation of powerful AI models exposing vulnerabilities, the French bank’s chief information officer Marc Camus said.
European banks have voiced concerns that they could lag U.S. lenders in accessing the most advanced cybersecurity-focused AI models, potentially widening operational and resilience gaps.
Camus said the speed and scale at which AI systems can now identify flaws marked a fundamental shift for cybersecurity teams, adding that the immediate challenge is a practical one.
“There is a lot of noise in the market on Mythos and the fact that Mythos is accessible or not accessible for some banks, particularly European banks,” Camus said on Tuesday at a joint press conference with French startup Mistral.
Anthropic’s Mythos model, unveiled in April, is designed to identify vulnerabilities across software systems at unprecedented speed and scale, raising fears such tools could enable a wider range of cyberattacks on financial institutions.
“The game changer is the speed at which we have to address vulnerabilities and the scale. There are lots of them discovered at once,” Camus said.
“So we need to prepare ourselves for that and that’s something we are really working on very, very hard,” he added.
Cybersecurity teams are now facing the need to process and fix large volumes of vulnerabilities in parallel.
AI VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS, COMPLIANCE
BNP and Mistral said they have expanded a partnership that began in 2023, when the startup was still in its early stages.
Corentin Petit, Mistral’s global head of solutions, said the startup was focusing on benchmarks relevant to regulated industries such as banking.
“We will optimise on benchmarks that matter for our customers in the industry,” Petit said when asked about Mythos, adding more details would come later.
BNP uses Mistral for internal tools and virtual assistants for clients in France and Belgium, as well as compliance at its Belgian Fortis business, said Sophie Heller, chief transformation officer at BNP’s retail and consumer division.
At BNP’s investment banking unit, other deployments support document extraction, equity research and internal knowledge retrieval for tens of thousands of staff, said Charles Holive, chief AI officer at the division.
Mistral engineers and data scientists are embedded within BNP teams to co-develop and scale these projects.
(Reporting by Mathieu Rosemain; Editing by Alexander Smith)
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