Public sector banks looks to scale up IT spend in view of cyber threat posed by Anthropic Mythos

Public‑sector banks are preparing to boost IT expenditure to strengthen their systems, protect customer information, and defend financial assets as worldwide worries grow about Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI tool and what it could mean for financial data security.

The sophisticated coding abilities of Mythos grant it an unprecedented capacity to uncover security flaws and devise ways to exploit them, raising fears that it might be employed to interfere with banking operations.

Faced with this emerging threat, banks must certainly raise their IT investments to harden their systems and curb cyber‑attack vulnerabilities, said Swarup Kumar Saha, MD & CEO of Punjab & Sind Bank, speaking to PTI.

He added that the bank plans to lift its IT budget in the current fiscal year to address the challenges brought by new technologies.

Furthermore, Ashwani Kumar, MD & CEO of UCO Bank, noted that the bank’s IT outlay will exceed that of the previous fiscal year, with a substantial share earmarked for cybersecurity.

These remarks gain importance after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman urged banks to adopt all requisite preventive steps to shield their IT systems, following Mythos’ demonstration of its ability to uncover OS weaknesses and potentially trigger a cyber attack.

“Indian banks are moving into a stage where they must view IT spending not merely as a running cost but as a survival cost. Cutting‑edge AI systems, particularly unreleased models such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, do not introduce a fresh risk class; they shrink the timelines of all existing threats,” remarked Srinivas L, Joint MD & Joint CEO of 63SATS Cybertech Limited, a subsidiary of 63 moons Technologies Limited.

The interval between a public disclosure of a software or platform flaw and its weaponization has shrunk from 19 days in 2023 to less than 72 hours now. Meanwhile, banks continue to rely on patching and response cycles built for a 2019 threat landscape, meaning they are fending off 2026‑style attacks with 2019‑era SOPs, Srinivas observed, noting that the typical reaction has been to pile on additional tools.

To confront these challenges, the government has instituted a panel chaired by SBI Chairman C S Setty to evaluate the risks posed by the Mythos AI platform and devise mitigation strategies.

Sitharaman said last week that banks will engage in extensive discussions over the coming weeks to grasp the threats and identify where extra investment is needed.

Regulators have sounded the alarm over Mythos, viewing it as a major challenge for the banking industry and its legacy IT infrastructure.

Banks and financial institutions are especially exposed because of their high interconnectivity—spanning payments, markets, clearing systems—and their reliance on legacy IT systems that run in real time.

A single successful cyberattack can rapidly spread across institutions and markets, given that a bank is connected to numerous domestic and global entities for inbound and outbound payments, foreign‑exchange trading, money‑market exposure, stock‑market linkages, depositories, payment gateways, and so forth.

The pilot rollout of Claude Mythos on April 7 sparked worldwide worry about its hacking potential. In tests, Anthropic, the U.S.–based AI firm, discovered that the newest model excels at cybersecurity and hacking tasks, surpassing human performance.

Anthropic asserted that the Mythos preview has already uncovered thousands of high‑severity vulnerabilities, including flaws in every major operating system and web browser.

Anthropic granted access to 12 technology companies through Project Glasswing, which it characterized as “an effort to secure the world’s most critical software.”

Published on May 3, 2026