Visa joins growing alarm over AI-powered risks
V•Visa has open-sourced part of its AI-powered cyber defense system after vulnerabilities exposed by AI models highlighted the scale of cyber risks. The company is preparing for autonomous attacks and future quantum-computing threats.
1. Cyber defense system
Visa President of Technology Rajat Taneja said the company made part of its cyber defense system available as open-source software after vulnerabilities exposed by Anthropic’s Mythos AI model highlighted the challenge. He described the vulnerabilities as “humbling” and said an AI-agent attack on Hugging Face may offer an early glimpse of future threats.
2. Preparing for attacks
Taneja said future cyberattacks could adapt and improve continuously without direct human intervention. “If the adversary is agentic, then the defence has to be agentic too,” he said. Visa processes roughly a billion payments a day worth around $15 trillion a year, and has started allowing certain AI agents to use Visa.
3. Quantum encryption risk
Taneja also warned that powerful future quantum computers could use Shor’s algorithm to break encryption standards underpinning global commerce. He said firms would have to keep looking for ways to neutralize that risk, adding: “There is no easy answer.”
