Michael Janda

Yes, and if this gets into the hand of hackers or even, you know, knowledgeable laypeople, it could absolutely destroy the cybersecurity of systems.

And, you know, this is a problem with cloud computing.

We've put everything on these big shared databases, and the only thing protecting that information and securing it and stopping it even being erased or locked up is, you know, code, is cryptography.

And if there are coding errors that can be exploited to lock up this information, to corrupt it, to delete it, then that could cause absolute chaos because it's not like we've got physical backups of a lot of this data.

So what happens if someone gets into the code of your bank and manages to scramble all the databases with the account details?

suddenly your account balance reads zero and the bank's struggling to recover all the information that's been locked or deleted or corrupted.

It's a real concern.

It's one the Reserve Bank and the Council of Financial Regulators in Australia have been concerned about for a number of years.

But I think what this is telling us is those concerns need to be accelerated.

As Alastair McGiven, who used to be the cybersecurity guru in Australia for the Australian government, put it, you know, this is something people need to be meeting this week to start making crisis plans and check whether their systems are vulnerable.

And as you point out, Carrington, the real fear here is that if Anthropic has done this now, it may be a matter of months until developers in China, perhaps even Russia...

come up with the same kind of artificial intelligence coding, particularly around hacking.

And there's always the danger the anthropic code leaks out.

I mean, they've given it to a very small select group of, I think it's about 40 organizations to test out.

But once this gets out of the bag, you can't put it back in.

Thanks, Carrington.

See you, Carrington.

And I'm ABC News Business Editor Michael Yander.

Yeah, it's so important that you timestamp that, Carrington, because things are changing by the hour.

We're getting different reports out.