At the beginning of May, Federal Reserve vice chair Michelle Bowman acknowledged that Anthropic’s Mythos — an artificial intelligence model that identifies cyber vulnerabilities — created a significant stir in banking.

This week, S&P Global Ratings released a report examining whether Anthropic’s claim about its Mythos model as represents “a genuine inflection point or an incremental evolution.”

In the report Hype Or Not, Mythos Signposts AI’s Growing Importance In Cybersecurity, S&P Global Ratings pointed out that the Mythos model focused attention on a threat already in motion: AI’s growing ability to discover and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities at scale

S&P Global Ratings said AI is already altering the speed and probability of cyberattacks and prompting a necessary reassessment of the stage-gate assumptions that underpin threat management in many organizations.

“Much of Mythos’s capability may reside in its operational framework — the ‘harness layer’ — rather than the model itself,” S&P Global Ratings analyst Sudeep Kesh said in a news release. “This suggests replication barriers are lower than headlines imply and that sophisticated threat actors may already have access to comparable offensive tools.”

S&P Global Ratings went on to mention AI is both a threat amplifier and a defensive instrument.

“An organization’s ability to exploit defensive AI while managing exposure to AI’s threats depends on governance quality, leadership decision-making, and investment prioritization; all of which are observable and credit-relevant variables,” S&P Global Ratings said.

The entire report can be found online.