Europe’s banking regulator has a new fear: an AI model clever enough to break into the financial system. It wants every big bank to have a plan by October.
The European Central Bank has a warning for the euro area’s largest banks. Frontier AI now poses a serious cyber threat, and lenders must draw up plans to counter it, Politico reports. Claudia Buch, who chairs the ECB’s supervisory board, wrote to bank chief executives. She set a deadline of end-October.
What the ECB wants
Buch asked lenders to patch software faster and harden their AI-enabled cyber defences. She also wants tighter oversight of the outside technology providers they lean on. Over the longer term, banks must modernise ageing infrastructure and sharpen their crisis response.
The order carries no fines. Banks that ignore it face no formal sanction. The ECB says it may still use the plans to rank lenders against each other and press the laggards.
