U.S. financial institutions are scrambling to batten down the hatches amid warnings that artificial intelligence poses a significant threat to markets and banking systems and could erase “millions of accounts overnight”.
A recent report from Axios indicates banks are “experiencing unvetted AI agent activity” as an increasing number of customers deploy agents to manage their finances, often providing them with private login information.
In some cases, agents are reportedly performing tasks without user approval, like autonomously contacting call centers — or even gaining unauthorized access to sensitive systems and platforms.
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“The activity is distinct from the rogue behavior involved in a summer attack on a startup called Hugging Face, where an AI agent swarm hacked a platform in an episode that kicked off an industry security crisis,” Axios reports.
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As phrases like “burgeoning cybersecurity crisis” and “scenario-planning for disaster” are being kicked around, David Sacks, Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has attempted to quell some of the mounting hysteria.
“There’s a world of difference between user-authorized agents (Muse, Instinct, Grokbot, etc.) and true unauthorized/rogue agents that could constitute cyberattacks,” Sacks wrote on X last week.
“Most of the activity described in the Axios story appears to be the former: customers sharing credentials with agents so they can take actions on their behalf. This may violate bank terms requiring humans to log in themselves, but these are in no way cyberattacks.”
Interestingly, banking giants are signaling their vulnerability as AI threatens their stranglehold on a financial system few humans are capable of fully understanding or navigating.
“Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts,” Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok wrote in a brief last month for the wealth management firm.
“If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system.”
Nonetheless, major institutions are reportedly preparing for “potential operational disruptions” as part of their mandated obligations to mitigate risks to critical financial infrastructure, and urging customers to do the same.
“You’re assuming they [agents] are going to act properly on your behalf and they may not,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told The Economic Club of Chicago earlier this month.
“You can’t stop it [AI]. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it.”
