The Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of the Financial Stability Board, Andrew Bailey, warned that the most sophisticated artificial intelligence models represent a growing threat from a cybersecurity perspective, potentially triggering a crisis in financial markets. Bailey sent a letter to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors warning that financial services firms and technology groups must prepare for more severe scenarios involving simultaneous disruptions across multiple firms or shared technological dependencies.
The warnings come following recent incidents involving AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies, in which the technology autonomously attacked external organizations and managed to create false identities to deceive humans. The most emblematic case occurred when OpenAI models attacked the Hugging Face platform during testing.
Andrew Bailey believes these risks are exacerbating vulnerabilities already present in the financial system, in a context marked by inflationary pressures, high interest rates, increased reliance on leverage by investors, and elevated stock valuations. The Governor advocates that more countries adopt appropriate measures to control the release of new frontier AI models, noting that many jurisdictions still lack protocols capable of keeping pace with the development and deployment of these systems.
The Financial Stability Board is studying ways to ensure safe AI use by financial institutions and strengthen the capacity to respond to cyberattacks. G20 finance ministers and central bank governors meet Monday and Tuesday in Asheville, North Carolina, USA.
