Alert exercise. G7 finance ministers and governors agreed on October 15 to organize simulations of cyberattacks carried out with frontier AI models against the financial system. Roland Lescure and the Governor of the Bank of France Emmanuel Moulin chaired the meeting, on the sidelines of the IMF annual meetings. The G7 thus responds to the alert launched by the Fund on attacks capable of undermining confidence in a major institution.
Cryptos do not appear anywhere in the press release. The stablecoins file remained on the desk of Andrew Bailey, the chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), the G20 body that coordinates financial regulators. Yet he was sitting in the room.
What the G7 Finances really decided in Bangkok
The press release published by Bercy contains one sentence on the subject.
“G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors discussed the impact of frontier AI models on cyber risks in the financial sector and ways to strengthen collective preparedness.”
Press release from the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Bangkok, October 15, 2026
The rest of the text talks about Ukraine and the fertilizer shocks. The G7 wants to mobilize at least 500 million euros to repair the Chernobyl arch, hit by a Russian drone.
The concrete detail comes from Tokyo. Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama explained to Reuters that G7 deputies had been working for weeks on “tabletop exercises” dedicated to border AI. The agreement “was validated at ministerial level”. A tabletop exercise is a simulation on a table. We unfold an attack scenario in front of decision-makers, who must react in real time as if it were true. The G7 finance ministries and central banks will write these scenarios themselves. They will be used to test existing protocols and rewrite response manuals. The G7 may involve private banks depending on the nature of the simulations. No calendar has been filtered.
The IMF warned this week that an AI-assisted cyber attack on a critical service of a financial institution could be enough to shake confidence. The Bank of England hit the nail on the head the same day. His vice-governor is working with banks on deep recovery options after the attack. Its starting point is simple: current defenses are no longer immune to an AI-driven offensive.
Stablecoins: the G7 hands over to the FSB
Nothing on stablecoins in the Bangkok text, therefore. To understand why, you have to look at the other meeting which was held at the same time in the same city. The FSB is the body created by the G20 in 2009, after the subprime crisis, to coordinate the world's banking and financial regulators. It reports to the G20, not the G7, and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has chaired it since 2025.
On October 8, Bailey sent a letter to the G20 finance ministers, also meeting in Bangkok this week. He made stablecoins “a key focus” of the FSB’s year. A note on the cross-border vulnerabilities of stablecoins has accompanied it since October 12. The file therefore exists, but it is moving forward on the path to the G20. The G7 did not see fit to take it up on its own.
The FSB figures give the measurement of the subject. The market is worth around $300 billion in mid-2026, a stable amount over one year. The dollar supports 99% of this value. Stablecoins primarily serve as a gateway to and exit from crypto markets, and in certain emerging countries as a substitute store of value. The diagnosis is less flattering than the figures. Cooperation between regulators “is still in its early stages,” Bailey writes. Some issuers “choose to set up in jurisdictions with little or no regulation”. And national frameworks “remain untested in situations of severe stress or insolvency”.
The three FSB projects on stablecoins
The note highlights a specific case, that of stablecoins with multiple issuers. Several affiliated entities then hold the same token with separate reserves. In the event of a panic, the refund request can focus on just one of them, without anyone knowing who owes what. The FSB therefore announces three projects: indicators for monitoring cross-border flows, better sharing of information between authorities, and work on the management of issuer bankruptcy. The G7 had promised stricter crypto regulations from 2023. Since then, the baton has passed to the FSB and the G20, under the American presidency this year.
The FSB published the final version of its best practices for the adoption of AI in finance on October 15, and Bailey asked that the subject remain on the agenda in 2027. For stablecoins, the three projects do not yet have a date. The FSB note reminds us in passing that the authorities still depend on private data compilers to measure a $300 billion market.
