NEW YORK/LONDON — Banking regulators are stepping up efforts to contain growing AI risks, six people familiar with the matter said, with some pointing to the potential for cyberattacks on banks or rogue agents undermining global financial stability.
The regulatory scrutiny, fresh details of which are reported here for the first time, reflects growing recognition that advances in frontier AI may require costly investments in cyber recovery, greater attention to dependencies on external technology providers and in some jurisdictions more formal regulatory guidance, sources said.
Three top regulators in the United States, including the Federal Reserve, are quizzing banks about their use of advanced artificial intelligence models, two of the people told Reuters, which adds to prior scrutiny.
Questions include whether they deploy Chinese-developed technology, use AI agents in cyber defense and can control increasingly autonomous systems, three of the people said.
In Europe, supervisors including the Bank of England and the European Central Bank are pressing banks to improve recovery plans, concerned that rapid advances in AI could cause serious harm and disruption in financial markets sooner than previously feared, three people with knowledge of their thinking said.
A senior executive at a large European bank said they too are worried about potentially major damage to banking and financial markets “within six months.”
The debate over AI oversight has intensified amid warnings from the industry after recent incidents, with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon urging corporate leaders to join a US-focused industry group to address AI risks, Reuters reported.
US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said this month a person in China likely used a Chinese-developed AI agent and Anthropic’s Claude Code in a hack on South Korean banks.
Rogue AI agents developed by OpenAI were, meanwhile, involved in a breach of AI platform Hugging Face, Reuters reported.
Anthropic researchers have warned that increasingly powerful AI systems could eventually escape human control and even pose an existential threat, prompting calls for stricter regulation.
Banks are competing to adopt agentic AI, which can accomplish tasks with minimal human supervision, while also grappling with the challenges of new models including IT weaknesses flagged by Anthropic’s Mythos tool.
“The adoption of AI is often outpacing the ability to put the controls in place,” said Michael Woodbridge, London-based cybersecurity partner at Grant Thornton.
US concerns
aim at agentic AI
The US regulatory inquiries center on how banks use agentic AI in areas such as cybersecurity, focusing on whether AI agents are being used to identify, prioritize and respond to threats.
Questions from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Fed focus on what limits are placed on systems, how their actions are monitored and approved, and whether banks can clearly track and audit AI agent decisions, two of the people said.
They are also asking what safeguards exist to prevent agents from exceeding their authority, whether humans remain involved in key decisions and how banks can shut down autonomous systems.
Through their questions, regulators are probing more specific issues tied to advanced AI models, including the use of autonomous AI agents, foreign-developed models and new cyber risks, the three people with knowledge of their thinking said.
The written and verbal inquiries to large, midsize and smaller banks show regulators are focusing on vulnerabilities from banks’ use of AI and their preparedness to act, they added.
Regulators are still gathering information and are not yet being prescriptive about what lenders should be doing, they said.