As authorities across the world come to terms with the threat posed by Anthropic’s Mythos, Indian banks are gearing up to hold threadbare discussions and explore if they need to make more investments to deal with this “AI-born challenge”, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Friday. These combined efforts of Indian banks will be led by State Bank of India Chairman CS Setty in his capacity as the head of the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA).
“Actively now, the banks have been told to work together. As Chairman IBA, Chairman and CMD of State Bank of India will be leading that effort. In the coming weeks, there will be a lot of interaction within the banks, understanding where more investments will have to be made, what kind of technologies can come in, how AI itself can be used for countering this AI-born challenge. Works are happening on that,” Sitharaman said at the inauguration of SBI’s Local Head Office in Kharadi, Pune.
Speaking to reporters at the launch of the office, the Finance Minister said the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is actively engaging with various governments and authorities globally as well as technology companies to understand how the situation with Mythos is going to play out and the kind of preparedness that is needed in India. This was the context of the meeting held on Thursday, Sitharaman said.
The Thursday meeting, held by Sitharaman and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, assessed the potential impact of emerging threats linked to recent developments in AI models, “particularly the possibility of such technologies being misused to weaponise software vulnerabilities”, the Finance Ministry had said. The meeting was attended by Department of Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju, CERT-In Director General Sanjay Bahl, senior officials from the Reserve Bank of India and National Payments Corporation of India, and heads of banks.
According to Sitharaman, Indian banks have proved themselves to be careful and protective of their customers and have been “adequately prepared” to meet any challenge arising out of technology-related risks. However, that “may not be sufficient”.
“They need to be there, they need to improve, they need to grow. But we need something new and far more versatile to be able to counter the newer threats which are likely to come,” she said.
Anthropic unveiled a preview of Mythos earlier this month, saying it is the most powerful model it has ever built. The company has not released the model to the wider public due to its unprecedented ability to autonomously identify serious vulnerabilities in widely used software and infrastructure, which poses significant cyber security threats. Anthropic has said Mythos can outstrip all but the most skilled humans at identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities. In tests, the model found critical faults in every widely used operating system and web browser. Mythos scored 73% on expert-level hacking tasks in independent testing, sending shockwaves across governments across the world.
Meeting cooking gas demand
Story continues below this ad
Commenting on the West Asia crisis’ impact on India, especially cooking gas availability, Sitharaman said on Friday that a Group of Ministers headed by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is continuously monitoring the situation and demand for LPG is being “largely” attended to.
In response to a question regarding the impact on businesses from the US tariffs as well as the ongoing West Asia war, Sitharaman said these are “constantly moving challenges”. “Each challenge is being addressed, each challenge will be responded (to),” she said.
Support from banks for growth
More broadly on the economy, the Finance Minister said given India’s size and aspirations, the consumption story will have to be “kept up” and support will have to be extended by the banking sector to agriculture, manufacturing, and services sectors.
“So, unless our domestic manufacturing, agricultural growth, tourism, IT and related services sector are given that constant support, predictable support, India’s growth story will be difficult to keep up. And, in that, banks have a very big role to play,” Sitharaman said.
Story continues below this ad
Referring to her Budget announcement on February 1 that a high-level committee would be set up to review the banking sector for Viksit Bharat, Sitharaman said the panel would be formed soon and its recommendations would govern “how the Indian banking will have to be refashioned, if at all that’s the recommendation”.
The launch of SBI’s Local Head Office in Pune, Sitharaman said, is an indication of how the country’s largest bank is moving towards meeting the aspirations for 2047 as it brings the decision-making layer closer to customers.
“Digitisation should happen – greater digitisation, greater access to everybody who is in a far-flung area, it brings in greater inclusivity, agreed. But…we should ask this question to ourselves: are we getting distant from our own customer base, because they are closer to the phone which is actually doing the function of the bank for them today, but not closer to us, the staff of the bank, who actually gives the human intervention?” she said.
At the same time, she called on SBI to better understand the local markets’ requirements and not limit itself to areas such as sugarcane, IT, or startups. “There are several hidden, unknown, untapped segments of the Indian economy which we can understand only when we get closer to them, interact with them a lot,” she said, citing the example of legacy industrial clusters that primarily consist of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).
Story continues below this ad
“Maharashtra is known for its MSMEs; we need to understand how many legacy clusters in Maharashtra need a complete upgrade, whether it is for bringing and using of AI – with all its challenges, it is not a total, uninhibited blessing to get AI… The legacy clusters in Maharashtra will have to be given support, the government has announced it in the Budget,” Sitharaman said.
