TOPSHOT - This photograph shows a figurine in front of the logo of the US artificial intelligence safety and research company Anthropic during a photo session in Paris on February 13, 2026. (Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP via Getty Images)

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If Mythos Has the Banks Running Scared, the Rest of Us Should Be Terrified

I’ve until now been pretty bearish on AGI.

I’ve said before that I cannot see how it can be achieved with current approaches and current levels of resources.

My views always been that we’re on an S-curve, not an exponential one. Surely at some point capability reaches a plateau?

But we have not plateaued. Each generation of AI model continues to deliver capability that the previous one could not touch. And from what I can understand of Mythos, this is not incremental. It is another step change.

I think I might need to revisit my position. And while my dismissal of AGI until now has been reassuring, I find the notion of questionning this quite terrifying.

Banks Are Already Worried

If Mythos already has the world’s financial institutions running around with their hair on fire: pay attention to what’s next.

I have spent most of my career working for and selling technology to some of the most respected financial instiutions in the world. Banks take cyber risks seriously. They agonize over resilience. And for all of banking’s faults, the sector has built a far better discipline of technology than most industries.

But even banking has spent the last decade adopting a “move fast and break things” culture, driven by fintech. I’ve often said this is the wrong approach, especially for this industry. Instead they ought to never, ever break things - and then move as fast as they can within that constraint. This, thankfully, is one of those moments, when they all seem to be reverting to instinct and approaching Mythos with the caution it deserves.

Yet as a consequence of this decade-and-a-half flirtation with BigTech, there is plenty of fast-and-loose tech today in finance, and so cyber and resilience weaknesses are going to be found all over the shop. And Mythos is finding them.

So, if Mythos is keeping bankers awake at night, what does that say about everyone else?

Most Businesses Are Sleepwalking

I speak with organizations every day about AI. Most of them are struggling even to roll out Copilot and achieve adoption. There are pockets of people who find it useful as a 21st Century search tool, but most still believe AI is a toy.

Meanwhile, senior executives are burnt out on stories about 95% of AI projects failing to deliver ROI.

And that is the danger. If you cannot see the business benefit of AI, yes, you’ll be blind to the opportunity. But you’ll be willfully blind to the risk too.

This isn’t just about Mythos itself getting into the wrong hands. It’s more that a bad actor now knows something like Mythos is possible. The version without the guardrails is not far behind, and unless you are using advanced AI to continuously test your own defenses, you are completely exposed.

Annual penetration testing is not enough. Quarterly pen testing is not enough. Neither is daily. What Mythos forces you to confront is to plan for continuous pen testing. That is a paradigm shift from where most businesses are today.

What Needs to Happen

Every company is in the sights right now. And maybe the answer is bigger than any single business.

Maybe governments need to start providing pen testing as a public service, because the economic cost of not keeping everyone secure is too great.

And for the UK, maybe that is how we compete: come here, do business here, because we will protect you:

Israel has seen its Golden Dome defense system put to the test greatly of late and it’s largely stood up to what’s been thrown at it.

If it wasn’t for the fear-alleviating protection that the Golden Dome has offered in the face of anxiety of an airborne attack - centres like Tel Aviv are likely not to have enjoyed the rapid growth and economic expansion that the tech industry has created.

Is it time we need a Golden Dome for cyber in the UK? I think we do, and we need one quickly.

A Golden Dome for cyber isn’t about protecting against drone attack. It’s about saving our economies from the Skynet-esque assault that models like Mythos might wage against our IT systems.

This might sound ambitious, fanciful even.

But after the Bank’s reaction to Mythos, it no longer feels like science fiction. It feels like common sense.