I like the idea of AI taking care of boring tasks, including sorting through bills and financial paperwork. I can even see the appeal of it helping with shopping. But asking an AI assistant for financial advice and simply handing over the keys to your bank account are different, and this distinction is becoming a problem for some of America’s biggest banks.
According to a new Axios report, financial institutions are encountering AI agents while they access customer accounts and seem to be doing more than requested by users. JPMorgan, Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are all taking steps to protect their customers, but it’s a sobering aspect of AI that raises real questions about how much to trust the tech in the world of finance.
While there’s no confirmed epidemic of AI assistants emptying savings accounts and the reports don’t establish any financial losses, it still makes me nervous to think that we’ve reached the point where banks are having to worry about whether an AI assistant has decided to improvise with somebody’s money.
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There’s been a real push to encourage the use of ever-more independent AI agents. Every new demonstration seems to involve an assistant that can accomplish increasingly complicated tasks while its owner sits back and watches. That’s impressive when the task is organizing a vacation itinerary, but less appealing when the assistant has access to the money that would pay for it.
AI experiments with money
It’s notable that it isn’t like AI agents are hacking their way into accounts, exactly. Customers might voluntarily share their login credentials with the AI to give the software access to financial information that banks have spent decades trying to protect. I’ve done it for my own tests, but it’s always been simply a way for the AI to look at very specific elements of my finances, never to touch them.
Banking websites can be frustrating, financial paperwork is tedious, and managing money requires more attention than most of us would prefer to give it. An assistant that promises to handle the irritating parts sounds wonderful. But AI agents have a habit of interpreting instructions rather creatively. And while asking it to reduce your monthly expenses and getting a list of subscriptions you might want to cancel is great, giving that same assistant permission to make financial decisions means you’re trusting its interpretation of a vague instruction with money you actually need.
That should make people uncomfortable. These systems can misunderstand requests and make incorrect judgments. We’ve all seen chatbots produce an answer that sounds perfectly reasonable until you discover they’ve invented half of it, and adding the ability to take real-world actions makes those mistakes considerably more consequential. The fact that banks are already encountering agents whose behavior raises questions about authorization suggests that those limits deserve much more attention.
Keeping AI outside the vault
I wouldn’t go so far as to say banks should block AI assistants altogether. There are plenty of good reasons to let people connect these tools to their accounts, and I don’t particularly like the idea of banks deciding which services customers are allowed to use.
But I’d be much less comfortable letting that same assistant actually do anything with my money I don’t ask for. I’d want it to ask permission every single time, with no room for interpreting something I said last Tuesday as authorization to make a transfer today.
That might defeat some of the appeal of autonomous AI agents, but I’m perfectly fine with that. Saving a few seconds isn’t worth the possibility of discovering that an AI assistant has made an expensive decision on my behalf. Most importantly, someone needs to be responsible when an agent makes a mistake, because telling customers to take it up with the chatbot isn’t going to cut it.
The frustrating thing is that none of this should come as a surprise. AI companies are racing to give their agents more independence, often before they’ve worked out how to prevent them from making mistakes. We’re supposed to be impressed that an assistant can complete a task without asking for help, but that becomes much less impressive when it does something the user never wanted.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
