Banks Are Struggling to Protect Customers From Their Own AI Agents

Leading US banks have reportedly found unapproved AI agents operating inside customer accounts on users’ behalf, sometimes acting independently of their instructions. In response, many institutions are resorting to blocking the tools or rethinking their security policies. 

According to a Thursday Axios report, unauthorized activity typically occurs after a user grants permission and login information to an AI assistant.

For example, Meta’s personal AI agent Muse connects with a third-party financial data-sharing service like Plaid so users can receive help analyzing their spending and planning for the future. In many cases, users give Plaid their bank login credentials or allow Plaid to access their account through their bank’s portal. As Axios notes, this permission goes against most banks’ guidelines, which generally require humans to log in to their own accounts. 

Banks like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America are restricting automated agents from accessing accounts, according to the Financial Times, and many are only permitting limited, read-only access to certain AI tools. 

One senior bank official told Axios that banks have difficulty distinguishing between different AI agents accessing accounts, as well as whether detected activity comes from an agent authorized by a customer or one that has gone rogue. The problem is reaching a level where banks have been forced to scale up their investment of resources into preparing for breaches and restoring customer access as quickly as possible—which, given other recent developments in AI-powered cybersecurity breaches, might not have been a bad idea anyway.

As Miranda Bogen, the founding director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s AI Governance Lab, told me in July—shortly after OpenAI first publicly disclosed how its AI models breached Hugging Face, a platform allowing people to share AI models—ordinary users of AI tools are at greater risk of their consumer-level agents breaching companies that conduct basic data processing practices and critical infrastructure providers like banks, schools, and hospitals. 

“What [AI regulation] laws have been able to move in a few states are laws that ask companies to come up with their own safety plan and to follow that safety plan,” Bogen said. These companies are “processing a lot of people’s data, and very few deployers of AI know how to test that AI well.”