American financial powerhouses are rushing to secure their systems amid a flood of popular—and often unpredictable—AI agents.

As agents become more commonplace, and users grant them access to greater and greater portions of their digital lives, organizations are facing a difficult choice: should they grant unfettered access to these popular systems, or block them from acting on behalf of users? Some businesses, most famously Amazon but also many airlines, have opted for the latter option. Charles Schwab and JPMorgan Chase took a similar route shortly after Muse became a cultural phenomenon. “We’re not going to allow just any… outside agent to come in inside the company, because it’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan,” the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon told investors on an earnings call earlier this month.

That’s likely a good call, given agents’ tendency to misinterpret user instructions and occasionally get a little too creative when they encounter roadblocks: OpenAI reported last week, for example, that an internal research agent went rogue and stole funds from a crypto wallet in order to complete what was meant to be a straightforward coding task. (The funds didn’t have any actual value, but they were still not meant to be accessed by bots.)

Automated assistants like Muse are just one of many new threats that the financial sector is contending with in the age of AI. The technology is also enabling a sophisticated new breed of phishing scams , for example. And as The Information reported on Wednesday, cybersecurity researchers recently found that a black hat hacker group called CyberCartel used AI systems from Anthropic, SpaceX, and other developers to steal sensitive data from hundreds of Latin American financial institutions.

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