A customer who hands a login to an artificial intelligence agent now gets turned away at four of the biggest names in banking in the United States.
Charles Schwab sees the attempts firsthand. Across all its clients, the brokerage blocks the big, unauthorized AI agents, including Meta’s Muse, “in the tens and 20s” each week, CEO Rick Wurster said, Bloomberg reported Friday (Oct. 16).
JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon warned of “rogue agents” and said outside agents would not get inside the bank during a third-quarter earnings call Tuesday (Oct. 13), PYMNTS reported.
Bank of America followed a day later with a condition rather than a ban. The bank is limiting agents’ access to consumer deposits while it writes protocols that decide which party is liable for a payment an AI authorizes, and CEO Brian Moynihan said Wednesday (Oct. 14) that a human should stay in the loop to approve money moving out of an account, the Financial Times reported Friday.
By Friday, Citigroup had drawn the same line. The bank does not let third-party agents log into accounts or transact, the FT report said.
Agents Can See Accounts but Cannot Pay From Them
All four firms kept the read-only door open while closing the one that moves money. At JPMorganChase, outside agents can see balances when a customer authorizes a connector such as Plaid, but they cannot send money or pay bills, and the bank gave no timeline for changing that, the PYMNTS report said. Dimon told analysts on the same call that customers who use outside agents should understand “the liability transfer.”
Citi lets certain authorized open banking providers retrieve account information in read-only form, according to the FT report.
Schwab will build model context protocol servers so a client’s chosen AI model can check balances and run research under rules Schwab sets, Wurster said in the Bloomberg report.
“We’re not going to allow them to move money…,” he said, per the report.
Bank of America is working with AI agent developers on protocols governing how an agent may interact with a customer account, so that customers do not find money has left an account without understanding why or where it went, the FT report said.
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Moynihan said during a Wednesday earnings call that he does not expect agents to pull deposits from the bank, PYMNTS reported. Customers hold checking balances to pay bills rather than to earn yield, and that excess liquidity is already directed to the bank’s yield products.
Banks Keep the Money-Moving Job for Their Own Assistants
The transfers the banks will not hand to an outside agent are the ones they plan to run themselves. Dimon wrote in his 2025 shareholder letter that JPMorgan’s Smart Cash capability would move client money automatically between checking accounts and higher-yielding brokerage products in 2026, PYMNTS reported Oct. 8. The bank is testing the same sweep an outside agent would offer inside its own app.
Schwab is doing the same with Charley, the generative AI assistant it announced Sept. 30. Charley answers questions on transfers, trading and account actions, pulls quotes and research, and hands off to a Schwab representative. It began rolling out in phases to eligible U.S. retail clients in October.
Wurster said he wants clients using Charley instead of handing a password to Muse, according to the Bloomberg report.
Consumers Use AI for Money but Want the Final Say
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Consumers Stop Sampling AI and Start Relying on It” found in February that 37% of AI power users relied on native AI platforms such as ChatGPT or Gemini as their primary tool for managing finances and banking in December.
Another PYMNTS Intelligence report, “The Pay Later Ecosystem Report: Consumers Will Let AI Recommend Pay Later, But They Want Control,” found in June that 39% of adults in the United States used AI for a payment-related activity in the three months before being surveyed and that consumers want the technology to ask permission before completing a purchase.
The permission step is the design spec, and one firm has already shipped it. Robinhood lets outside AI agents trade through its banking MCP server with a customer-set spending limit, optional manual approvals and no access to the primary card number, PYMNTS reported May 27.
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