Unauthorised AI bots are operating inside major US bank accounts and appear to be carrying out tasks they were never asked to do, according to an insider.
The source said banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo had detected third-party bots accessing accounts and were rushing to kick them out and rewrite their terms of service, according to Axios.
This typically happens when an AI agent or assistant accesses a human’s account with the user’s permission and login details, the publication reported.
Banks say this goes against their guidelines requiring humans to log into their own accounts.
The situation was described as “horrifying” by bank bosses, with one official saying the industry was concerned bots could take actions that impacted customers’ finances.
Banks have been able to track AI agents contacting call centres and appear to take actions independent of user instructions, people said.
Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citi are said to have begun blocking or restricting third-party agents from accessing their platforms.
One bank executive told Axios it is differentiating between agents and humans, as well as whether an agent was authorised by a user or had gone rogue and gained access to a customer account.
It comes as an Australian-based engineer laid out a plan for keeping increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence on a leash, as concerns grow across the planet following recent security breaches.
Associate Professor Craig Jin stressed we should never give machines direct control over money, networks or infrastructure, calling for several independent locks to be placed between its “thoughts” and the real world.
Professor Jin, from the University of Sydney’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, told news.com.au governments must work quickly to build an entirely separate system capable of making checks.
Professor Jin’s regulation proposition clashes with safety campaigners like Dr Roman Yampolskiy, who say there is no cage humans could build capable of containing an adequately-outfitted superintelligence.
“My immediate concern is not a science-fiction picture of a machine suddenly becoming omnipotent,” Professor Jin told news.com.au.
“It’s a capable autonomous system being given too much authority and too many pathways into consequential systems before our monitoring and containment mechanisms are adequate.
“That is a much more concrete engineering problem that we can try to focus on.”
In September, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined 21 other world leaders in calling for common international safeguards around “frontier AI”, including pre-deployment testing, independent evaluations and the rapid reporting of serious safety failures.
US President Donald Trump used his address to the United Nations to flatly reject the proposal, declaring America would “totally reject any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control” over AI.
Fighting against the tide of polarisation, governments are now trying to design international restraints for a technology whose developers are racing to make it more powerful. The concern among safety researchers is that the country building most of it has declared global oversight unwelcome, and that the push has come too late.