Speaking to reporters at the launch of the office, the Finance Minister said the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is actively engaging with various governments and authorities globally as well as technology companies to understand how the situation with Mythos is going to play out and the kind of preparedness that is needed in India. This was the context of the meeting held on Thursday, Sitharaman said.

The Thursday meeting, held by Sitharaman and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, assessed the potential impact of emerging threats linked to recent developments in AI models, “particularly the possibility of such technologies being misused to weaponise software vulnerabilities”, the Finance Ministry had said. The meeting was attended by Department of Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju, CERT-In Director General Sanjay Bahl, senior officials from the Reserve Bank of India and National Payments Corporation of India, and heads of banks.

According to Sitharaman, Indian banks have proved themselves to be careful and protective of their customers and have been “adequately prepared” to meet any challenge arising out of technology-related risks. However, that “may not be sufficient”.

“They need to be there, they need to improve, they need to grow. But we need something new and far more versatile to be able to counter the newer threats which are likely to come,” she said.

Anthropic unveiled a preview of Mythos earlier this month, saying it is the most powerful model it has ever built. The company has not released the model to the wider public due to its unprecedented ability to autonomously identify serious vulnerabilities in widely used software and infrastructure, which poses significant cyber security threats. Anthropic has said Mythos can outstrip all but the most skilled humans at identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities. In tests, the model found critical faults in every widely used operating system and web browser. Mythos scored 73% on expert-level hacking tasks in independent testing, sending shockwaves across governments across the world.

Commenting on the West Asia crisis’ impact on India, especially cooking gas availability, Sitharaman said on Friday that a Group of Ministers headed by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is continuously monitoring the situation and demand for LPG is being “largely” attended to.

In response to a question regarding the impact on businesses from the US tariffs as well as the ongoing West Asia war, Sitharaman said these are “constantly moving challenges”. “Each challenge is being addressed, each challenge will be responded (to),” she said.