Banks prepare for new challenges amid ascent of AI

India’s largest banks are stepping up cyber defences, hiring, and insurance coverage as concerns grow that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems could make cyberattacks faster and harder to contain.

- Shouvik Das & Shayan Ghosh

The pressure has risen after finance ministry officials met top banking executives on 23 April to discuss banks’ preparedness for AI-linked cyber threats. The meeting came weeks after Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, a frontier AI model the company said could identify vulnerabilities and potentially aid cyberattacks at unprecedented speed.

HDFC Bank, India’s largest private lender, said it reviews cyber insurance annually and is now widening coverage as risks evolve. “The bank is continuously strengthening its cyber security posture, including hiring highly-skilled talent across security engineering, developer security operations, red-teaming or simulation of cyber attacks,” said Lakshminarayanan, group head of information technology and chief information officer at HDFC Bank.

At Axis Bank, teams participate in programmes such as adversarial AI and red-teaming to simulate attacks. They also receive training in AI-driven threat detection and analytics in the bank's security operations centre, said Vinay Tiwari, the bank's chief information security officer.