Australia’s markets regulator has publicly confirmed it is watching the development of Anthropic’s Mythos model alongside peer regulators worldwide, adding to a rapidly expanding international regulatory response that began with the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department. ECB President Lagarde has warned no governance framework is yet in place.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) confirmed on Monday that it is monitoring the development of Anthropic’s frontier AI model Mythos and its potential implications for the Australian financial market, Reuters reported.
“ASIC is closely monitoring these developments along with peer regulators to assess possible implications for the Australian market,” an ASIC spokesperson said.
“ASIC engages closely with other regulators, government agencies and the financial sector to understand and respond to changing technologies.”
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The regulator added that it expected financial services licensees to “be on the front foot” to safeguard their customers and clients.
The ASIC statement is the latest in a cascade of global regulatory responses to Mythos, the advanced AI model that Anthropic launched on 7 April 2026 under a restricted access programme called Project Glasswing.
Anthropic claimed the model successfully identified and exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, a capability the company says is intended to accelerate defensive security work but which regulators have identified as a potential systemic risk if threat actors accessed the model’s capabilities.
The response from financial regulators has been rapid and unusually coordinated for a technology event. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, speaking at Columbia University in New York, warned that Mythos could “crack the whole cyber risk world open” and called on regulators to urgently assess the extent to which the model can identify and exploit vulnerabilities in financial infrastructure.
The Bank of England’s Cross Market Operational Resilience Group (CMORG) and its AI Taskforce subsequently scheduled meetings to discuss Mythos within weeks. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told Bloomberg TV that there is currently no governance framework “to actually mind those things”, a frank admission that the regulatory infrastructure has not kept pace with the technology.
In the United States, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent meeting of major bank CEOs to discuss Mythos’s cyber risk implications.
The meeting, held while bank chiefs were already in Washington for a Financial Services Forum board meeting, was confirmed by CNBC. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was the only major bank CEO who could not attend.
A Treasury spokesperson subsequently confirmed the meeting and said Treasury plans to lead further sessions with regulators and institutions on an ongoing basis.
On the commercial side, major US banks have begun internal testing of Mythos for defensive purposes. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told analysts on a quarterly earnings call that the bank has access to the model and has “hypersensitivity” to the enhanced capabilities of new AI systems.
JPMorgan Chase was named as an initial Project Glasswing partner, alongside approximately 40 companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
Anthropic has committed $100 million in credits to these partners and $4 million to open-source security organisations, with the explicit goal of building defensive capacity ahead of any public capability release.
The core risk that regulators are assessing is structural rather than individual. Financial institutions run technology stacks that layer decades-old legacy systems with modern cloud infrastructure, creating accumulated technical debt and undiscovered vulnerabilities.
The banking sector’s heavy reliance on a small number of consolidated cloud providers means that a sufficiently capable AI model exploiting vulnerabilities in those providers’ systems could cascade across the entire financial system.
IBM Senior Vice President Rob Thomas has publicly criticised Anthropic’s restricted-access approach, arguing that “security improves more often through scrutiny than through concealment.”
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has defended the restricted rollout, writing that “the dangers of getting this wrong are obvious, but if we get it right, there is a real opportunity to create a fundamentally more secure internet and world.”
Anthropic’s relationship with the US government remains complicated by a separate dispute. The Department of Defense designated Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security, a classification the company has contested in court.
A federal appeals court denied Anthropic’s request to temporarily block the designation, leaving it barred from DoD contracts, though a separate preliminary injunction allows the company to continue working with other government agencies while the legal challenges proceed.
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