Christine Lagarde used a monetary policy press conference in Frankfurt on June 11 to lay out the European Central Bank’s growing concern about AI-powered threats targeting the financial system.
Her message was blunt: AI developments “are moving faster and becoming more intrusive.” The same technology powering chatbots and code assistants is also making cyberattacks smarter, cheaper, and harder to detect.
What the ECB is actually doing about it
Lagarde outlined two main response strategies. The first involves hardening the ECB’s own defenses and those of the broader Eurosystem, the network of eurozone central banks. The second focuses on using the Single Supervisory Mechanism, the ECB’s banking oversight arm, to push supervised institutions toward stronger protective measures.
She specifically named OpenAI and Anthropic as major AI developers whose rapid advances are contributing to the new threat landscape.
