The International Monetary Fund has published analysis warning that advances in artificial intelligence are increasing the scale and speed of cyberattacks on the financial system and could turn extreme cyber incidents into macro-financial shocks. The note says AI-enabled attackers can more quickly identify and exploit weaknesses in widely used software, cloud services, payments networks and other shared infrastructure, raising the risk of correlated failures across multiple institutions rather than isolated operational losses. According to the analysis, severe incidents could create funding strains, solvency concerns, payment disruption, confidence effects and fire-sale dynamics if several firms are affected at the same time, with spillovers into other sectors that rely on the same digital foundations. The paper argues that supervisors should treat cybersecurity as a core financial stability issue and strengthen resilience standards, supervision of systemic transmission channels, and public-private coordination on threat intelligence and incident response. It also says AI can improve defense through faster threat detection, fraud prevention, vulnerability identification and more secure software development, but only if firms invest in integration, governance, human oversight, business continuity, disaster recovery and broader cyber hygiene, alongside stronger international coordination and capacity development.

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