TL;DR:

• Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel used a speech in Rome on Tuesday to urge banking authorities to act on the misuse risk of Anthropic’s Mythos model, and to call for wider access to keep the playing field level.
• Nagel described Mythos as a “double-edged sword” capable of both hardening and exploiting legacy IT systems — the precise concern UK regulators including the Bank of England have already signalled.
• The intervention puts the Bundesbank alongside the Bank of England and ECB in escalating central-bank AI-policy voice, extending last week’s IMF-meeting debate into a public call for access rebalancing.

Joachim Nagel’s Rome speech lifts the Mythos debate onto the central-bank stage days after UK banks were signalled for imminent access to Anthropic’s frontier model. For UK financial services, the Bundesbank’s position matters because PRA supervisory thinking has tracked closely with Eurosystem peers on generative AI risk — any push toward mandated broader access would recalibrate the UK’s own supervisory approach.

A central-bank line on selective rollout

Nagel’s concern is twofold: Mythos’s coding capability can “quickly identify and exploit security vulnerabilities” in financial-institution software, yet the model currently sits behind Anthropic’s Project Glasswing wrapper — a controlled-access programme restricted to a short list of partners. Smaller and mid-tier institutions without access are therefore exposed defensively without benefiting offensively, a competitive distortion Nagel flagged directly: “All relevant institutions should have access to such technology to avoid competitive distortions.”

Broader AI and inflation challenge

Beyond Mythos, Nagel challenged the assumption that AI will put sustained downward pressure on inflation. He noted that AI drives investment demand, lifts incomes and pushes up electricity prices — and warned that pricing algorithms can “consistently learn to charge excessive prices” without explicit coordination, echoing ongoing competition-authority debates in the UK and EU. For a central-bank governor whose core mandate is price stability, that framing matters.

Looking forward

With Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey already on record on Mythos from the IMF meetings and Lloyds confirming a new chief data and AI officer this week, the UK banking sector is visibly recalibrating around frontier-model policy. The practical question for UK banks’ boards is how long Glasswing-style partner gating remains tenable once Eurosystem and PRA voices converge on a shared “wide access” line — and whether procurement and risk frameworks are ready for that shift.