The bank's message follows a trend among financial institutions that are restricting third-party AI agent access.
The age-old warning “don’t share your passwords with anyone” applies to AI agents, too.
The second-largest bank in the US is urging its customers to stop sharing their banking login credentials with AI. In an email blast titled “Protecting your finances in the AI world,” Bank of America advised customers against sharing their passwords with AI agents.
This follows a trend across banking institutions, where some of the top banks in the country, including Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, are restricting third-party AI agent access.
AI agents like Meta’s Muse, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s Dots work on behalf of the user and across apps and services to make purchases, send messages, and fulfill to-dos. But the agents can pose a great risk to your banking portfolio if, for example, they make a financial decision on your behalf or compromise your information in a data leak.
Despite their growing popularity and quick adoption by the general public, AI agents are a privacy nightmare. One of the fast-growing agents, Muse, requests contacts, calendar, email messages, and logins and passwords as you set up your account — but it doesn’t stop there.
Just last week, Axios reported that AI agents are gaining unauthorized access to their user’s bank accounts and acting independently of user instructions, sending some of the biggest US banking institutions into a frenzy.
JPMorgan has already blocked Muse and AI agent Instinct from accessing bank accounts to seemingly get ahead of this AI privacy issue.
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