When Jamie Dimon is asked about the greatest risk he sees to the global economy, his answer for years has been “geopolitics.”
It’s been with good reason. In the past handful of years, Russia invaded Ukraine; a major conflict broke out between Israel and Palestine; and the U.S. and Israel then launched attacks on Iran, with the fallout spreading across the Middle East. Add to that global tensions rising because of President Trump’s tariff regime, a threat to invade Greenland, and escalating trade tensions with China, and the drama on the world stage seems to be reaching a crescendo.
But even these facts have been equaled by a new threat the JPMorgan CEO sees on the horizon: cyber.
Last month, Fortune’s Beatrice Nolan exclusively reported that AI company Anthropic is developing, and had begun testing with early access customers, a new AI model more capable than any it has released previously, following a data leak that revealed the model’s existence. A draft blog post that was available in an unsecured and publicly searchable data store prior to Fortune’s report said the new model is called Claude Mythos and that the company believes it poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks. A multibillion-dollar market rout ensued, particularly in the software and financial services sectors.
This week, Dimon was asked about his top concerns during a live podcast appearance in Oslo at the Norges Bank Investment Management conference.
“Cyber,” was his immediate response. He explained: “The bad guys can use cyber, and they’re going to get stronger and more powerful in terms of finding vulnerabilities. It’s been written about.”
Turning to the most dramatic risk for the free world in the longer term, Dimon also mentioned global political tensions. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are top of mind, and “our relationship with NATO has to stay strong,” Dimon added. “The worst thing we can do is fragment it … What we should be doing is trying to make sure we keep the Western world together.
“Fragmentation would be the reason that a book is written one day: How the West Was Lost … I’m quite conscious that we should do that to strengthen our economic alliances, strengthen our military alliances. There are legitimate complaints—no problem, we can deal with those, but we should make sure we don’t fragment the world we have—which is precisely what Russia and China wants.”
Reality bites
For all the promise AI offers to businesses, employees, and Wall Street, its very potential is also the reason it poses such a massive risk. Dimon’s cyber concerns, now with a real-world example in Mythos, echo the worries expressed when developments in artificial intelligence first began garnering attention.
Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, wrote back in 2023 that he had identified three risks when it came to AI: the rapid pace of economic disruption; ensuring that AI systems remain aligned with human values and interests; and finally, bad actors having access to AI. As Gates wrote, models would become more powerful and “more capable of conducting cyberattacks, creating biological weapons, even compromising national security.”
Mythos creator Anthropic itself has been quick to highlight instances where its technology has been used for ill. In mid-September 2025, the Silicon Valley disrupter wrote that it had identified a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign,” focused on roughly 30 global targets, that had succeeded in a small number of cases. In a blog post, Anthropic detailed it had “high confidence” that the attacker was a Chinese state-sponsored group that had “manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration.”
While Anthropic has highlighted cases like this (indeed, a small group of customers has been given access to Mythos to identify and patch their vulnerabilities), the fact remains that cybercriminals—either developing or deploying a range of models from around the globe—are already succeeding with the help of AI.
