IMF warns of financial risks as AI boosts cyberattacks

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is amplifying cyber threats and undermining financial stability, and has called for resilient policies and international cooperation to address this growing threat.

• IMF: Intro to AI and financial Stability  
• Cyber risks amplified by AI
• Implications for financial systems  
• Strategies for resilience and defense

In a blog published on May 7, the IMF—an international organization that works to promote global economic stability—said that, for better and worse, AI is “transforming how the financial system copes with vulnerabilities and reacts to incidents,” citing analysis that suggested extreme cyber‑incident losses could trigger funding strains, raise solvency concerns, and disrupt broader markets.

“The financial system relies on shared digital infrastructure that’s highly interconnected, including software, cloud services, and networks for payments and other data,” the IMF wrote. “Advanced AI models can dramatically reduce the time and cost needed to identify and exploit vulnerabilities, raising the likelihood of simultaneously discovering and targeting weaknesses in widely used systems.”

As a result, it warned that “cyber risk is increasingly about correlated failures that could disrupt financial intermediation, payments, and confidence at the systemic level.”

The IMF report comes as the AI arms race is reaching new heights, with frontier models increasingly raising alarm bells over their potential utility to hackers and financial criminals.

This was evident in April when Anthropic announced the controlled release of its most advanced AI model, Claude Mythos—revealed as “Mythos Preview” for its early testing phase.

Researchers for the firm, who tested how the AI model handled specific requests or tasks, published a report on April 7 stating that Mythos was “strikingly capable at computer security tasks.” They found that the advanced model could find and exploit vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser—even when used by non-experts. In addition, it could locate dormant bugs lurking in decades-old code and easily exploit them.

This naturally caused widespread concern, not least at the IMF, which said in its blog post last week that the release of Mythos “underscored how quickly risks are increasing… Models such as Mythos illustrate the nature of the challenge because they amplify existing cyberattack techniques by operating at machine speed.”

It added that “this foreshadows how fast‑moving, AI‑driven cyber risks could destabilize the financial system if not managed carefully, and why authorities must focus on building resilience through supervision and coordination—rather than treating these developments as purely technical or operational issues.”

In a financial system built on common software and shared service providers, AI breaches can cause particular havoc by creating simultaneous vulnerabilities across many institutions.

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Financial stability implications

In terms of AI’s impact on the finance space, the IMF said three main factors elevate cyber risk to the level of a potential macro‑financial shock.

Firstly, risks are systemic, with attacks becoming more dangerous when discovery and exploitation scale rapidly; secondly, and following on from this, risks can cut across sectors due to the financial sector sharing digital foundations with energy, telecommunications, and public services. Thirdly, AI can further concentrate risk and failures, with one vulnerability rippling across many institutions.

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The appropriate response

According to the IMF, the appropriate response to the growing threat advanced AI poses to financial stability can be boiled down to international cooperation, resilience-focused policy, and the use of AI for defense.

On the latter, the IMF said that AI is a “critical” part of the solution.

“When attackers operate at machine speed, defenders must do the same,” said the report. “Financial institutions increasingly use AI‑supported tools to detect threats, prevent fraud, identify vulnerabilities, and respond to incidents.”

AI can also help reduce vulnerabilities during development rather than patching them after release.

However, while advanced AI can also be used for cyber defense, the IMF argued that attackers still have the advantage, because discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities can occur faster than patching and remediation.

The report also cautioned that the potential defensive benefits of AI will only materialize if institutions invest in integration, governance, and human oversight, “areas that supervisors increasingly need to assess.”

Nonetheless, defenses will inevitably be breached, so another key recommendation of the IMF was to make resilience a priority to limit the spread of incidents and ensure rapid recovery.

For example, controls to stop the spread of attacks can prevent local breaches from escalating into system‑wide disruptions. These measures are often costly and complex but are among the most effective tools for containing AI‑enabled attacks.

Other resilience boosting measures include cyber stress testing, scenario analysis, and board‑level oversight of cyber risk, which the IMF described as “indispensable components of financial stability frameworks.”

However, resilient policy at a national level can only achieve so much if it is inconsistent on a global scale. The IMF warned that as technology’s capabilities spread across countries, inconsistent oversight could weaken a globally interconnected system, particularly in emerging and developing economies, which often face more severe resource constraints.

“That’s why stronger international coordination, more information sharing, and expanded capacity development are critical to preserving global financial stability,” read the report.

The IMF summarized its arguments by underscoring that the challenges posed by frontier AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, must be addressed through “resilience, supervision, and international coordination.”

In the view of global economic stability experts, only with these measures can financial markets be safeguarded against attackers wielding the latest AI tools.

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