JPMorgan Chase customers shouldn’t expect their personal AI agents to have access to their accounts anytime soon.
The typical security concerns around any new adaptation of technology are “heightened” with AI agents, “because you don’t want rogue agents, and there could be thousands of them,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Dimon said during an earnings call Tuesday. Unlike chatbots, which primarily answer questions, AI agents are designed to take action on behalf of a user and have increased in popularity after the introduction of Meta’s personal AI assistant, Muse.
“If people are using them, they should understand the risk,” Dimon said, saying there’s a “liability transfer” away from the bank, as well as risks that their data is “misused.”
The company is building its own agentic tools for clients, Dimon said, but for now, it plans to closely guard the bank from the onslaught of outside AI agents.
“In the meantime, we’re not going to allow just any outside agent to come in inside the company because that’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan,” Dimon said.
The bank is already blocking access to “to the extent that we’re able to block those,” Jeremy Barnum, the bank’s chief financial officer, said.
“I think right now, some of the services that offer that do it through credential sharing, and we have a long record of being against that way of doing things, screen scraping, et cetera,” he said. “It’s not secure.”
If a customer gives an AI agent their credentials, they could be responsible for any unwanted actions the agent takes.
“It’s not an ideal state of things,” Barnum said.
JPMorgan has also tightened controls on AI agents used by its own employees. Business Insider previously reported that the bank rolled out new security measures for some engineers who use Anthropic’s Claude, restricting AI’s access to employees’ internal systems.
Dimon and Barnum’s comments were contrasted with concerns that AI agents could cause a bank run from low-yield into high-yield savings accounts, a theory raised by Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk in late September.
Bank stocks, already declining following bond market turmoil, have fallen further since the launch of Meta’s Muse on September 22, and Barnum said they saw “a little bit of a response in bank stocks around those releases.”
Barnum suggested this concern is a continuation of two trends the bank has felt: “yield-seeking flows” and competition from fintechs.
As for yields in high-interest savings accounts, Barnum said the bank is focused on “primary bank share” rather than yield chasers. The bank’s standard Chase Savings account earns a 0.01% annual percentage yield, while others in the market earn 4% (though it does offer higher-yield cash products to its private wealth clients).
And while Barnum said the bank works to “have parity” with fintech companies, he also thinks the bank’s traditional brick-and-mortar footprint provides its own defense against encroachment.
“Our perspective is that, on the one hand, it’s nothing new, but that doesn’t mean that we’re complacent about it,” Barnum said about fintech competition.
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