Ministers are pressing Britain’s biggest businesses to boost their cyber-defences amid fears that artificial intelligence software such as Anthropic’s Mythos could enable a new wave of hacking.
Baroness Lloyd of Effra, the cybersecurity minister, has written to almost 200 business leaders, urging them to embrace a new “cyber-resilience pledge” to shore up their security.
The pledge will be adopted by businesses that have made cybersecurity a board-level responsibility, signed up to the National Cyber Security Centre’s early-warning service and required the “cyber essentials” certification across their supply chains.
The government hopes the pledge, which will be launched formally in the summer, will set a new benchmark for industry and provide investors and customers with assurances as concerns mount over the security threat posed by AI.
Anthropic, a US AI company, announced last week that it was not releasing Mythos, a new model focused on cybersecurity, because it was said to be so effective at finding flaws in software.
Instead, Anthropic handed it to 40 US technology companies so they could boost their cyber-defences.
Although some experts have questioned whether the announcement was a marketing ploy, Wall Street, the City and regulators are taking it seriously.
British banks including Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest are in contact with Anthropic about gaining access to the American group’s artificial intelligence model.
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, said that Anthropic may have “found a way to crack the whole cyber-risk world open”.
The UK’s AI Security Institute, one of the few institutions outside the US to test Mythos, called it a “step up” in capability and said it was “at least capable of autonomously attacking small, weakly defended and vulnerable enterprise systems where access to a network has been gained”.
It said: “We cannot say for sure whether Mythos Preview would be able to attack well-defended systems.”
Dan Jarvis, the security minister, will also push the pledge at the CyberUK conference this week.
Lloyd said: “The cyber threat facing UK businesses is serious, growing and evolving fast. AI is giving attackers capabilities that would have seemed extraordinary just a year ago and no
organisation can afford to be complacent.
“Everyone has a role to play in bolstering Britain’s cyber-defences. That’s why I have written to nearly 200 business leaders across the country, calling on them to act by signing the new cyber-resilience pledge.
“Cyber-resilience isn’t just a technical issue; it’s a board responsibility and we’re asking every boardroom in Britain to prove they treat it as one.”
Jarvis is expected to say in a speech this week that there is a perception gap between the impact of cybercrime and physical crime. He will tell delegates at CyberUK in Glasgow: “Think about the recent attack on Jaguar Land Rover and the damage it inflicted on their business.
“If this damage had been caused by an old-school physical attack, it would have been the equivalent of hundreds of masked criminals turning up to dealerships across the country, breaking glass, smashing up computers and driving cars right off the forecourt. The truth is, there is no real difference between them; they are both brazen acts of criminality.”
Despite warnings from the government and the National Cyber Security Centre about the threat from hacking, businesses appear to be slow in heeding the advice. Only 56,000 certificates for the NCSC’s cyber-essentials programme were issued in 2025, representing 1 per cent of British businesses.
The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which will force companies in key sectors to increase resilience, is working its way through parliament.
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