BNP Paribas partners with Mistral AI to build European answer to Anthropic's Mythos

BNP Paribas works with Mistral on a European answer to Anthropic's Mythos

Locked out of the most powerful AI cybersecurity model in production, the eurozone's biggest bank is helping build its own. BNP Paribas is working with Mistral AI to prepare for a category of AI cybersecurity tools its US peers already use and its European supervisors cannot reliably get hold of, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday. The Paris-based bank, the eurozone's largest by assets, is one of several European institutions helping Mistral develop a cyber-focused model intended as a counterpart to Anthropic's Mythos. Mythos is the restricted-access AI system Anthropic launched earlier this year that can identify and exploit security vulnerabilities at machine speed; in controlled testing the model produced working exploits on its first attempt more than 83% of the time, often beating human red-teamers. Access has been deliberately rationed to roughly 40 to 50 organisations, mostly large US tech firms, US national-security partners and a handful of US banks including JPMorgan Chase. No European bank sits on the list. The European Commission has been in stalled talks with Anthropic over access since April, with Spanish officials publicly describing the negotiations as deadlocked. The European Central Bank has spent the past several weeks warning eurozone supervisors that Mythos-class tools change the threat picture for banks regardless of who has access. If attackers obtain a comparable model, the ECB's Frank Elderson told banks earlier this month, defenders without one will be structurally behind. The Bundesbank has formally backed Brussels in pressing Anthropic for access. Anthropic has so far resisted on the grounds that wider distribution would make the model itself a weapon. That standoff is the gap Mistral is trying to fill. The French firm, already Europe's best-funded foundation-model company, has been pitching a sovereign European alternative since at least mid-May. BNP Paribas's involvement is the most concrete sign yet that the European banking sector is willing to put balance-sheet weight behind the project rather than wait for Brussels-Anthropic talks to unblock. The two firms already have a three-year commercial agreement across Mistral's broader model lineup, signed in February. What the Mistral cyber model would actually do is, on current public reporting, an answer that has not been independently demonstrated. Mythos is a particular kind of system, trained to combine vulnerability discovery with exploit generation in a single workflow, and replicating that capability without the access to red-team data Anthropic has accumulated will not be straightforward. The pitch to BNP Paribas and other prospective European bank customers is in part that a sovereign model with even somewhat lower capability is preferable to no model at all on the defensive side. It is also a hedge against the possibility that Brussels-Anthropic talks collapse permanently. The broader pattern here is familiar from the past year of European tech policy: a US firm builds a frontier capability, restricts access on safety or national-security grounds, and European institutions respond by trying to build a domestic equivalent. The same logic has driven recent European pushes on cloud sovereignty, payments rails and, most loudly, semiconductor manufacturing. Banking cyber-AI is the newest entry in that list, and the BNP Paribas-Mistral pairing is its highest-profile concrete project. Neither BNP Paribas nor Mistral commented on the specific Bloomberg report. Mythos has not been demonstrated in the wild on a European bank to date.

BNP Paribas and Mistral Team to Prep for Mythos-Related Threats | PYMNTS.com

As Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (May 26), the effort is to help prepare for cybersecurity threats from artificial intelligence (AI) models such as Anthropic's Mythos. "The focus has been a lot on 'is Mythos accessible or not accessible?' but let's not forget there are other models from other firms that exist," Marc Camus, BNP's chief information officer, told reporters at a news conference in Paris. The partnership comes as Mistral has been in talks with European banks about using its answer to Mythos, an AI model said to be able to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities at unprecedented levels. Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Mistral has been working on a cybersecurity-focused AI model of its own. Anthropic rival OpenAI recently launched its "Daybreak" initiative, designed to boost cyber defenses and, as CEO Sam Altman put it, "continuously secure software." As Bloomberg notes, the rise of Mythos has alarmed banks, with Anthropic warning when the model debuted in April that its roll out was a "watershed moment for security" because of its ability to uncover software security flaws. The model is not yet widely available, with Anthropic first wanting to test its abilities with a small group of companies, chiefly based in the U.S., an effort known as Project Glasswing. So far, Mythos has uncovered more than 10,000 "high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities" in some of the "most systemically important software in the world," Anthropic said in a report on Glasswing issued over the weekend. "Progress on software security used to be limited by how quickly we could find new vulnerabilities," the report said. "Now it's limited by how quickly we can verify, disclose, and patch the large numbers of vulnerabilities found by AI." Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence and Trulioo shows that large enterprises are increasingly contending with AI-powered cyberattacks. "Larger firms, with their larger footprints, can be more susceptible to the AI-powered spoofing of identity documents thanks to the industrialization of deepfakes and automated data scraping capabilities by adversarial cyber actors," PYMNTS wrote last week. The research found that a majority of surveyed companies (58%) with more than $1 billion in yearly revenue reported dealing with AI-generated documents or deepfake-related attacks in the prior year, a full 11 percentage points more than smaller businesses.

BNP Paribas teams up with Mistral AI on cybersecurity threats By Investing.com

Investing.com -- BNP Paribas SA is working with French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI and other partners to address cybersecurity threats posed by new AI models, including Anthropic PBC's Mythos. BNP Chief Information Officer Marc Camus said Tuesday at a press conference in Paris that the focus should not be limited to Mythos accessibility, noting that other firms have similar models. Mistral has been in discussions with European banks about deploying its response to Mythos, the limited-access AI model that can identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed and scale, Bloomberg News reported. The startup has been developing its own cybersecurity-focused AI model, according to the report. Financial institutions worldwide have expressed concern about Mythos, an AI model launched by Anthropic in April with a warning that its release represents a watershed moment for security due to its ability to detect software security flaws. Mythos remains unavailable to the general public while Anthropic and a select group of mostly US partners test its capabilities. Mistral's head of solutions Corentin Petit said Tuesday the company is working on the cybersecurity topic directly with finance customers on specific use cases, though no official announcement has been made. The partnership between BNP and Mistral, recently extended through a three-year deal, includes using AI to replace some tasks beyond cybersecurity. Applications include virtual assistants for retail clients and AI-powered scenario planning for bankers. The French lender said it is not limited to working solely with Mistral, though it did not name other providers. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.