Citi CEO Warns AI Is Fueling Cyber Defense Race
Jane Fraser says companies are rushing to secure systems as more capable AI models raise cybersecurity risks.
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[Image source: Anvita Gupta/MITSMR Middle East]
Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser said companies are racing to strengthen cyber defenses as increasingly capable AI models raise the risk of more sophisticated attacks.
“There is a race to defend and shore up all of the firm’s perimeters and there is a tsunami of patching going on in the world at the moment in all companies,” Fraser said Sunday at the Qatar Economic Forum in New York, according to Bloomberg.
Fraser pointed to Anthropic’s release of its Mythos model earlier this year as a turning point. “That was not a good day,” she said.
Mythos was designed with advanced cybersecurity capabilities, prompting Anthropic to restrict access. The company said the model could identify vulnerabilities and potentially be misused for cyberattacks.
Its release also prompted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and then Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to meet Wall Street executives in Washington and urge them to prepare for more powerful AI models.
Concerns have grown after Anthropic and OpenAI disclosed incidents in which models reached systems they were not authorized to access during cybersecurity testing. Anthropic said Claude models gained unauthorized access to real systems at three organizations after a testing environment was inadvertently connected to the internet.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has since called for companies to slow improvements in frontier AI capabilities while strengthening safeguards and independent evaluation.
Other executives have been more cautious about the most severe warnings. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said at the forum that people should “slow down” in assessing the risks, according to Bloomberg, adding that he was “highly confident humanity will be here and that we’ll all be participating actively.”
Fraser said another constraint on AI development is also shifting.
“The bottleneck has moved from chips into energy,” she said, pointing to rising electricity demand from AI computing.
