U.S. Banks Lock Out A.I. Agents
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden ● Covered by 2 sources
Big U.S. banks are blocking A.I. agents from moving customers’ money. They’ll let bots read balances, not push transfers — and they’re worried about liability.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Major U.S. banks and brokerages are drawing a hard line: A.I. agents can look at accounts, but they can’t move money. The most visible target is Meta’s Muse, a personal agent that can help with email, travel and calendars, and can also connect to bank accounts through Plaid to explain balances, transactions and investments.
Charles Schwab is actively stopping unauthorized agents, chief executive Rick Wurster said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. He said the firm gets weekly reports on blocked bots, and that the big providers are being stopped “in the tens and twenties each week.” His view is blunt: if clients hand over login credentials to an agent, then nobody fully controls what happens next.
Schwab is not shutting A.I. out entirely. It will still let outside models check balances and run analyses through its own MCP servers. What it will not allow is money movement. Instead, Schwab is pushing its own assistant, Charley.
JPMorgan Chase is taking a similar stance. Jamie Dimon called out “rogue agents” on the bank’s quarterly earnings call, and the bank blocks agents that log in with customers’ banking credentials. Authorized open banking providers are still allowed to share data. According to The Financial Times, Citigroup and Bank of America are moving the same way, with Citi no longer allowing A.I. agents to carry out transactions and Bank of America wanting a human to keep approving money leaving customer accounts. The banks have already raised the issue with officials at the Federal Reserve, according to the report.
There’s also a money motive hiding in plain sight. Critics say banks worry that agents could automatically move cash into higher-yielding accounts. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, said such accounts in the U.S. pay 3.3 to 5 percent a year, while the average checking account pays 0.1 percent. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo together hold $1.6 trillion in non-interest-bearing deposits, and The Financial Times said paying 3 percent on that money would cost them roughly $47 billion a year, almost half of their combined annual profit. Security worries are real too, but Congress is still debating who pays when an agent makes a bad transfer.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic bank behavior: they’ll welcome A.I. as a talking head and slam the door when it reaches for the money. That’s not just caution; it’s a pretty loud sign that the real fight is over deposits, not safety. The “rogue agent” line is handy, but the yield math is doing a lot of the work here.
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