RBC considers blocking Meta’s Muse AI agent, CEO Dave McKay says

Royal Bank of Canada is considering blocking Muse, Meta Platform Inc.’s popular artificial intelligence agent, from accessing the bank’s customer information, RBC chief executive Dave McKay said.

“It’s something I’m thinking about, absolutely,” McKay said Tuesday in a Bloomberg Television interview, adding that the bank hasn’t made a final decision. “You have to protect that customer and then we’re liable for that as an organization.”

The CEOs of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Charles Schwab Corp. said last week their firms are blocking or limiting outside AI agents’ access to their clients’ data. AI agents including Muse, which was released to the public last month, have the potential to disrupt bank business models by automating cash transfers into higher-yielding accounts.

But McKay said there are concerns about not being able to monitor transactions. Data “being scraped or taken away without their consent or fraudulent consent” is another issue, he said.

“We’re working through those details now and we’re not going to make a rash decision, but we have to balance the needs of a consumer with the privacy and safety of the system,” he said.

McKay said Canada is poised to be a prime destination for AI investment, given its power generation capabilities and clear rules from the government about building data centre capacity. He said he sees less public pushback than in the United States.

“I think we got ahead of some of the challenges the U.S. is facing,” he said, citing efforts to ensure that residential and commercial electricity prices don’t go up.

While the RBC CEO is a strong proponent of the technology, having invested significantly in his own bank’s deployment of AI, McKay said he’s taking steps to limit direct exposure to the sector.

“We’re actually taking some risk off the book ourselves,” he said, adding that the bank is writing strategic risk transfers to decrease the risk of AI loans on its balance sheet. “And we’re thinking about positioning our portfolio a little bit. Too much of a good thing’s not a good thing in banking.”

—With assistance from Jonathan Ferro, Lisa Abramowicz and Annmarie Hordern.