Artificial intelligence is amplifying the cyber threats facing the global financial system and could trigger a system-wide shock unless regulators and banks build stronger defenses, the International Monetary Fund warned Thursday.

In a blog post published on the IMF’s website, Tobias Adrian, the fund’s monetary and capital markets director, along with senior officials Tamas Gaidosch and Rangachary Ravikumar, said advanced AI models can dramatically reduce the time and cost needed to identify and exploit software vulnerabilities, raising the risk that attackers could target weaknesses in widely used systems simultaneously across many institutions.

“Cyber risk is increasingly about correlated failures that could disrupt financial intermediation, payments, and confidence at the systemic level,” the authors wrote, adding that earlier IMF analysis suggests that extreme cyber-incident losses could trigger funding strains, raise solvency concerns, and disrupt broader markets.

The IMF officials pointed to Anthropic’s recent controlled release of an advanced model called Claude Mythos Preview, which they said could “find and exploit vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser—even when used by non-experts.” That capability, they said, illustrates how quickly AI-driven cyber risks could destabilize the financial system if not managed carefully.

The IMF said attackers currently hold the advantage because, in a financial system built on common software and shared service providers, discovering and exploiting flaws at machine speed can outpace patching and remediation. 

The authors identified three features that elevate AI-enabled cyber risk to a potential macro-financial shock: the attacks scale rapidly once a vulnerability is found, the financial sector shares digital foundations with other critical sectors, such as energy and telecommunications, and reliance on a small number of software platforms, cloud providers, and AI models concentrates the impact of any single exploited weakness.

“Confidence effects, payment disruptions, liquidity strains, and fire-sale dynamics could follow if multiple institutions are affected simultaneously,” the authors wrote.

The IMF officials said AI is also a critical part of the defense, with financial institutions increasingly using AI-supported tools to detect threats, prevent fraud, and respond to incidents, and to reduce vulnerabilities during software development rather than patching them after release. But those benefits will materialize only if firms invest in integration, governance, and human oversight, the officials said.  

“As AI reshapes the cyber landscape, the central question for authorities is whether the financial system can continue to function under severe stress,” the authors said. “Answering that question requires putting systemic risk—and the tools to manage it—at the center of the AI-cyber conversation.”