Letter from the Governor to the Daily Mail
Letter
Connor Axiotes is right to draw attention to the seriousness of frontier AI and its potential impact on the risk of cyber attacks (‘Humanity is no longer in control of its most awesome creation since the atom bomb’). But his assertion about the Bank of England’s cyber defences being unsophisticated is totally wrong, unfounded and dangerous. For obvious security reasons we do not discuss our defences in detail. But I can assure Daily Mail readers the Bank has the right investment, expertise and capabilities and works extremely closely with expert partners including the National Cyber Security Centre.
The issue that should concern the public is the wider risk posed by frontier AI to the financial sector and its customers. Frontier AI may make cyber-attacks faster and easier to perpetrate, outages more disruptive, and scams by criminals more convincing. The Bank has consistently warned for a number of years that firms must strengthen their detection efforts and responses, patch vulnerabilities faster, and be able to recover when things do go wrong. As a regulator we require that banks prove to us that they can do this through stress tests and penetration testing.
It is also why the Bank has called for stronger international coordination around testing frontier AI models before wider deployment. No country can seal itself off from these risks. Thankfully the UK is well placed through the AI Security Institute and the NCSC, and the Bank is, as you would expect, working at speed with these organisations and our international partners to help strengthen the cyber resilience of the banks and firms we supervise.
The issues of AI and cyber-attack are rightly being scrutinised, but readers can be assured that the Bank and the UK authorities are focused on them and taking action.
In view of the strong public interest in this matter, and in the interests of transparency and accountability, I am publishing this letter.
Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey
