Mistral engineers and data scientists have been embedded within BNP teams to co-develop and scale various AI-powered projects
French financial services giant BNP Paribas is bolstering its cybersecurity defences in anticipation of powerful AI models exposing vulnerabilities in the coming days, stated the venture’s chief information officer, Marc Camus.
Camus’ statement comes amid European banks voicing concerns that they could lag their American counterparts in terms of accessing the most advanced cybersecurity-focused AI models, potentially creating significant operational and resilience gaps between the financial landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic.
“The speed and scale at which AI systems can now identify flaws marked a fundamental shift for cybersecurity teams, adding that the immediate challenge is a practical one,” Camus noted.
“There is a lot of noise in the market on Mythos and the fact that Mythos is accessible or not accessible for some banks, particularly European banks,” he observed at a joint press conference with French startup Mistral.
American AI company Anthropic’s Mythos model, unveiled in April 2026, has been designed to identify vulnerabilities across software systems at unprecedented speed and scale. However, a section of the financial circle has raised the red flag by stating that such innovation could also be used to enable a wider range of cyberattacks on institutions.
“The game changer is the speed at which we have to address vulnerabilities and the scale. There are lots of them discovered at once. So, we need to prepare ourselves for that, and that’s something we are really working on very, very hard. Cybersecurity teams are now facing the need to process and fix large volumes of vulnerabilities in parallel,” Camus said.
BNP and Mistral have been in a partnership since 2023. And the scope of operations has expanded now, with Corentin Petit, Mistral’s global head of solutions, stating that the venture, through its tie-up with BNP Paribas, was focusing on benchmarks relevant to regulated industries such as banking. Mistral engineers and data scientists have been embedded within BNP teams to co-develop and scale various AI-powered projects.
“BNP uses Mistral for internal tools and virtual assistants for clients in France and Belgium, as well as compliance at its Belgian Fortis business,” said Sophie Heller, chief transformation officer at BNP’s retail and consumer division.
“At BNP’s investment banking unit, other deployments support document extraction, equity research and internal knowledge retrieval for tens of thousands of staff,” remarked Charles Holive, chief AI officer at the division.
