In this interview, Ravi Teja J explores the growing phenomenon he refers to as the “Claude Mythos”, the rise of AI-enabled cybercrime and the new operational realities it creates for enterprises. He discusses how deepfakes, voice cloning, synthetic fraud, and autonomous attacks are changing the rules of cybersecurity, why traditional defence models are no longer sufficient, and how organisations can build operational intelligence capable of detecting and responding to machine-speed threats.
As India’s digital economy continues to expand, Ravi shares his perspective on the urgent need for AI-driven resilience, stronger governance frameworks, and intelligent security architectures designed for a future where trust itself has become a target.
Q1: Ravi, you’ve been talking about something called the “Claude Mythos” in the context of AI and cybercrime. What does that actually mean, and why should Indian businesses care right now?
Ravi Teja:
Let me be clear, “Claude Mythos” is not about one AI tool.
It’s a way of describing how modern AI is being used to power cybercrime.
What once needed an organised fraud network can now be done by one person with a laptop.
AI can generate fake voices, realistic emails, regional-language scams, even synthetic identities, at massive scale.
For India, this is a serious concern because our digital adoption happened extremely fast. UPI, Aadhaar, digital public infrastructure, all of it expanded the attack surface quickly.
But the security ecosystem hasn’t evolved at the same speed.
The barrier to sophisticated cybercrime has collapsed.
Today, intent matters more than resources.
Q2: Can you give us a real picture of the threat landscape? What are the AI-powered attacks you’re actually seeing or preparing for in India today?
Ravi Teja:
Five categories stand out, and they are not theoretical, they are operational realities.
- Voice cloning
- Hyper-personalised disinformation
- AI-powered financial fraud
- Infrastructure attacks
- And synthetic identity fraud
Voice cloning is especially dangerous in India because we are a voice-first society.
People trust audio.
A scam today doesn’t need complex hacking, it only needs a cloned voice that sounds familiar during an emotional moment.
Disinformation has also evolved dramatically.
AI can now generate fake political videos, multilingual propaganda, and thousands of social media accounts at machine speed.
Financial fraud is becoming smarter too.
AI is helping criminals bypass KYC systems, generate fake documents, and execute scams with real-time guidance.
And infrastructure attacks are becoming autonomous.
AI agents can identify vulnerabilities, generate exploit paths, and move across networks without human intervention.
The concern is simple:
Most infrastructure was never designed for machine-speed adversaries.
Q3: The numbers around deepfake fraud are striking. What’s the data telling us about the scale of this problem?
Ravi Teja:
The numbers alone should concern every boardroom in India.
RBI reported over ₹1,457 crore in digital payment frauds during FY2024, nearly a fivefold increase in just one year.
Globally, deepfake-enabled fraud losses crossed $200 million in a single quarter in 2025.
And recent studies show something even more worrying, 66% of people cannot identify AI-generated audio as fake..
AI is no longer simply helping cybercriminals, It is industrialising cybercrime.
This is no longer just a technology problem.
It’s a human trust problem.
Q4: There’s often an assumption that cybersecurity is an IT problem. You’ve been pushing a different frame. What’s the shift in thinking you’re urging?
Ravi Teja:
The biggest mindset shift organisations need today is:
Traditional cybersecurity was built around perimeter defence, keeping attackers outside the network.
But AI-driven threats have changed the game completely.
Modern attacks don’t arrive like obvious intrusions.
- They arrive as a trusted voice note.
- A convincing executive email.
- A synthetic identity.
Something that looks completely normal.
That’s why traditional detection models are struggling.
What businesses now need is not just cybersecurity as an isolated IT function.
They need operational intelligence.
That means combining real-time telemetry, behavioural analytics, predictive intelligence, and automated response systems directly into business operations.
Because the reality is simple:
Most organisations are still defending against human-speed attacks.
But the threats today operate at machine speed.
Modern threats don’t look like intrusions anymore.
They look like trust.
Q5: What does Prudent’s response actually look like in practice? How are you helping organisations stay ahead of something that evolves this fast?
Ravi Teja:
Our approach is built around five core capability areas that directly address the AI-driven threats we’re seeing today.
For voice and deepfake fraud, we use AI-powered authenticity verification to detect synthetic voice markers in real time, before sensitive actions are approved.
For disinformation, we deploy multilingual content forensics that analyse AI-generation patterns, metadata, and content origin across Indian language ecosystems.
For financial fraud, we combine behavioural analytics, document forensics, and anomaly detection to identify synthetic identities and suspicious activity that rule-based systems often miss.
For infrastructure security, we enable autonomous threat hunting and AI-assisted incident response to dramatically reduce detection and containment time.
The philosophy behind all of this is simple:
Detect faster.
Respond faster.
Adapt faster than the threat itself.
Q6: If you could leave India’s business and policy leaders with one urgent message about where we need to go from here, what would it be?
Ravi Teja:
The first thing India needs to do is stop treating AI-driven cyber threats as future risks.
They are already operational realities.
We urgently need AI-focused cyber resilience frameworks, deepfake governance policies, adversarial testing standards, and faster intelligence-sharing systems.
But policy alone is not enough.
Execution is what matters.
Organisations need infrastructure that can detect AI-generated threats early, correlate signals across systems, and respond before damage spreads.
There’s a story I often think about.
A retired schoolteacher in Hyderabad transferred her savings after hearing her son’s voice in a voice note asking for help.
The voice was AI-generated.
Her son was asleep in the next room.
After that incident, the family created a private code word, something only they would know.
That’s the larger lesson here.
India now needs its own version of that code word, across enterprises, financial systems, and critical infrastructure.
In the age of AI-driven threats:
Cybersecurity is no longer just protection.
It is operational intelligence.
With Prudent, Defend Against Tomorrow’s Threats, Today.
