Citi CEO Says Companies Scrambling to Launch AI Cyber Defenses

Citigroup’s CEO says artificial intelligence-related security concerns have led to a wave of cyber defense fixes in the business world.

“There is a race to defend and shore up all of the firm’s perimeters, and there is a tsunami of patching going on in the world at the moment in all companies,” Jane Fraser said Sunday (Sept. 20) at the Qatar Economic Forum in New York City.

When Anthropic released its Mythos model this year and warned of its potential risks, that was “not a good day,” added Fraser, whose comments were reported by Bloomberg News.

That report added that the arrival of Mythos led Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to summon Wall Street leaders to Washington and urge them to ready their systems for more advanced AI.

Since then, Bloomberg noted, many of the world’s top AI companies have disclosed that their agents had hacked into other companies. That’s led executives like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to warn that companies need to slow the pace of AI development.

This month also saw former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon warn that researchers believe that the technology could kill people by the end of the decade. Industry executives such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang countered saying that the technology poses no extinction risk.

“I think we all need to take a deep breath, slow down,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said Sunday at the forum, per Bloomberg. He added that he was “highly confident humanity will be here and that we’ll all be participating actively.”

PYMNTS spoke last week with a number of experts who say that slowing the pace of AI development is not the same as slowing its adoption.

Maya Mikhailov, CEO and co-founder of Savvi AI, described a gap between what the labs are concerned about and the technology their customers actually use. Scaling back frontier AI development does not equal slowing AI adoption, she told PYMNTS, because most enterprise customers “aren’t even using the state-of-the-art models to begin with.”

And Minyang Jiang, chief strategy officer at Credibly, questions the competitive logic behind the whole idea.

Scaling back would only give the advantage ground to which the company kept moving forward, she told PYMNTS. And “who really wins in the end?” she asked, if advancing AI destroys value more quickly than it creates it.

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