British banks are set to gain access next week to a powerful artificial intelligence tool developed by Anthropic, a system the company has previously restricted from public release over safety concerns, according to people familiar with the matter.

The rollout marks a significant expansion of the model’s availability beyond a tightly controlled group of primarily US-based corporate users, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, according to The Guardian.

Anthropic said it will extend access to selected UK financial institutions as part of a broader push into regulated industries, where demand for advanced AI systems is growing but concerns around risk, misuse, and oversight remain high.

The move comes as senior figures in the financial sector continue to voice caution about the rapid deployment of frontier AI models, warning that their capabilities could outpace existing governance frameworks if not carefully managed.

“That is in the very near term, in the next week,” Pip White, Anthropic’s head of UK, Ireland and northern Europe operations, said in a Bloomberg TV interview.

“As you would expect, the engagement I have had from UK CEOs in the last week has been significant.”

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI family, has said its latest model, Mythos, presents an unprecedented risk due to its capability to uncover weaknesses in IT systems.

“AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities,” Anthropic said in a blogpost earlier this month. “The fallout – for economies, public safety, and national security – could be severe.”

Finance ministers, senior executives and regulators have been weighing emerging global risks this week as they meet in Washington for the IMF and World Bank spring meetings, amid growing concern over the wider economic and geopolitical fallout from the US–Israel war with Iran.