NEW DELHI/MUMBAI, May 20 -- India's largest banks are stepping up cyber defences, hiring, and insurance coverage as concerns grow that advanced AI systems could make cyberattacks faster and harder to contain, exposing gaps in preparedness and protection.

The pressure has risen after a finance ministry meeting with top banking executives on 23 April focused on banks' preparedness for AI-linked cyber threats. The meeting came weeks after Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, a frontier AI model the company said could identify vulnerabilities and conduct cyberattacks at unprecedented speed.

Concerns around AI-enabled attacks have grown since September last year, when a cloud storage server exposed personal banking data of nearly 300,000 indivi...