Major U.S. banks are detecting and deleting unauthorized third-party artificial intelligence agents that are taking actions inside customer accounts, Reuters reported Thursday (Oct. 22), citing a paywalled article by Axios.
Some of the agents the banks have detected appear to have tried to take actions that were not requested by the user, according to the report.
PYMNTS reported Monday (Oct. 19) that over the previous week, JPMorganChase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Charles Schwab all said that AI agents cannot move customer money.
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Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster said the brokerage is blocking unauthorized AI agents a double-digit number of times every week, JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon said outside agents would not get inside the bank, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said that a human should stay in the loop to approve money moving out of an account, and Citigroup said the bank does not let third-party agents log into accounts or transact, according to media reports.
While the four firms do not allow AI agents to move money, they do allow them to perform read-only functions such as seeing balances, according to the report.
PYMNTS reported Oct. 8 that AI agents could soon move household cash from checking accounts to accounts that pay higher rates of interest, with the agents removing the friction that had traditionally led to that money staying put.
U.S. Bancorp CEO Gunjan Kedia said during an Oct. 15 earnings call that U.S. Bank had not encountered third-party AI cash-sorting agents that automatically move cash among banks to seek better rates.
“The logistics of doing something like this are very complicated, so we do not expect it to be a near-term impact to us,” Kedia said.
PNC Financial Services Group Chairman and CEO William Demchak said during an Oct. 15 earnings call that banks must compete with third-party AI agents by offering better solutions and that in the meantime, attempts to have agents transact on a user’s behalf inside their accounts is “incredibly unsafe” and “not going to happen.”
“For that to ultimately take place, there’s going to have to be laws passed on liability shifting,” Demchak said. “It’s going to have to happen through secure connections and authentication and human-in-the-loop.”
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