The world’s top financial-stability watchdog is warning that increasingly powerful artificial intelligence could dramatically increase the speed and scale of cyberattacks, creating risks that extend beyond individual banks or companies and potentially threaten confidence in the broader financial system.
Financial Stability Board Chair Andrew Bailey issued the warning Monday in a letter to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, calling the potential impact of frontier AI on cyber risk the most immediate AI-related concern facing the financial system. Bailey said advanced models are demonstrating increasingly sophisticated autonomy, problem-solving abilities and threat capabilities.
The concern is not simply that hackers can use AI to launch more attacks. Frontier AI could change the economics of cybercrime by allowing sophisticated attacks to be carried out faster, at greater scale and potentially with less human involvement. In a financial system where banks and other institutions often depend on the same technology providers and infrastructure, a serious attack could also disrupt multiple organizations at once.
The warning comes just days after more than 100 technology, cybersecurity, financial and infrastructure companies called for stronger defenses against AI-enabled attacks. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Amazon were among the companies backing the effort, warning that increasingly capable AI models could make sophisticated cyberattacks far more widespread. Hospitals, water systems and internet infrastructure were among the critical services identified as potentially vulnerable.
There is another side to the technology: financial institutions and cybersecurity teams can use advanced AI to discover vulnerabilities and strengthen defenses before attackers exploit them. But regulators increasingly appear concerned about whether those defenses can advance quickly enough. Bailey called on governments to support safe and responsible deployment of frontier models while urging financial institutions to strengthen their ability to respond to and recover from major cyber incidents.
