CURRENT AFFAIRS | 24 APRIL 2026
CLAT GK + CONSTITUTIONAL LAW & RELEVANT AREA
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on 23 April 2026 chaired a high-level meeting with heads of scheduled commercial banks, the Reserve Bank of India and the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology on the systemic risks posed to India’s financial system by Anthropic’s newly-unveiled frontier AI model ‘Claude Mythos’. Anthropic — the US-based Amazon- and Google-backed lab — has described Mythos as ‘the most powerful model we have ever built’; in UK AI Security Institute evaluations it scored 73% on expert-level hacking tasks and autonomously identified critical vulnerabilities in every widely-used operating system and web browser. Sitharaman urged the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) to build a coordinated institutional defence with CERT-In, NPCI and RBI, and confirmed that the government is already in conversation with Anthropic’s senior leadership in the United States.
Key Facts at a Glance
| Meeting | 23 April 2026 — FM Sitharaman with RBI, MeitY and heads of scheduled commercial banks |
| AI model | Claude Mythos (Anthropic) — unveiled April 2026 as preview under ‘Project Glasswing’ |
| Capability concern | Autonomously discovers ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities in widely-used OS and browsers |
| UK evaluation | 73% on expert-level hacking tasks — UK AI Security Institute benchmarks |
| Directive | IBA to build coordinated mechanism with CERT-In, NPCI, RBI, banks |
| Nodal cyber agency | CERT-In under Ministry of Electronics & IT (IT Act §70B) |
| Reporting timeline | 6 hours — CERT-In Directions, 28 April 2022 |
| Statutory pillars | IT Act 2000 · DPDP Act 2023 · PMLA 2002 |
Constitutional & Statutory Framework
- IT Act, 2000 §70B — constitutes CERT-In as national nodal agency for cyber-incident response.
- IT Act, 2000 §70 — empowers declaration of ‘critical information infrastructure’ (CII).
- IT Act, 2000 §43A — compensation for failure to protect ‘sensitive personal data’.
- DPDP Act, 2023 — India’s dedicated personal data-protection statute; §10 imposes ‘reasonable security safeguards’ on Data Fiduciaries.
- PMLA, 2002 — catches cyber-enabled financial crime and money-laundering trails.
- Article 21 — right to life includes right to privacy and informational self-determination.
- Article 14 & 19 — privacy jurisprudence draws additional textual anchors from equality and freedom of expression.
- BNS, 2023 — substantive criminal offences (fraud, cheating, forgery) that underpin cyber-crime prosecutions.
Landmark Cases & Key Organisations
- KS Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) — 9-judge bench: right to privacy is a fundamental right; informational privacy explicitly recognised.
- Puttaswamy (Aadhaar) (2018) — Proportionality test: any restriction must satisfy legality, legitimate aim, proportionality, procedural safeguards.
- Shreya Singhal v Union of India (2015) — Struck down §66A, IT Act; upheld §69A on narrow grounds — baseline for content-regulation review.
- Anuradha Bhasin v Union of India (2020) — Internet access itself is a part of Article 19(1)(a) freedom of speech.
- CERT-In — national cyber-incident response agency; issued April 2022 Directions mandating 6-hour reporting for defined cyber-incidents.
- Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) — representative body of Indian banks; now tasked with building a sectoral cyber-defence playbook against AI-enabled threats.
CLAT 2027 Angle — Why This Matters
- Expect passages linking ‘AI-enabled hacking’ with Puttaswamy’s proportionality test — does a regulatory response satisfy legality + legitimate aim + proportionality + procedural safeguards?
- Key vocabulary: zero-day, critical information infrastructure, Data Fiduciary, Data Principal, reasonable security safeguards.
- Remember triad: IT Act (preventive/adjudicatory) + DPDP (privacy) + BNS/PMLA (criminal).
- Policy angle: India is moving towards a sectoral AI regulation conversation — contrast with EU AI Act risk-tiers and UK AI Safety Institute.
Mnemonic
MYTHOS — Models find Yawning vulnerabilities, Trigger Highest-level Oversight, Sectoral defence.
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