Banking watchdogs are ramping up efforts to control increasing risks from artificial intelligence. This heightened oversight is being driven in part by the threat of cyberattacks on banks or rogue AI agents hindering financial stability, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Those sources say this scrutiny is a sign of increasing recognition that AI advances could mean greater investment in cyber recovery, more focus on dependency on outside tech providers, and more formal guidance from regulators in some jurisdictions.
US Regulators Question Bank AI Use
Three of the top U.S. regulators, the Federal Reserve included, are questioning banks about their use of advanced AI models, adding to earlier scrutiny, two of the sources told Reuters. These queries involve whether the banks use technology developed in China, if they use AI agents for cybersecurity, and if they can rein in autonomous systems, sources said.
As Reuters notes, the debate around AI oversight has been ramping up following warnings from the industry about security concerns. J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has called on corporate leaders to join a U.S.-focused industry group to tackle AI risks.
The cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said recently that a person in China likely used a Chinese-developed AI agent and Anthropic’s Claude Code to hack banks in South Korea. And rogue AI agents from OpenAI breached AI platform Hugging Face during the summer.
European Watchdogs Push for Stronger Recovery Plans
Meanwhile, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank are imploring banks to strengthen recovery plans, worried that rapid AI advances could bring disruption to financial markets earlier than thought, three of the sources added.
While federal banking regulators updated their joint model-risk guidance in April, the scope of those regulations did not include generative and agentic AI. The agencies called those technologies novel and rapidly evolving, and said they planned a separate request for information on banks’ AI use.
That has left state regulators to create a new framework that suggests a broader examination of the entire AI system. “An examiner may want to know who owns an application, where it operates, which data it can access, which vendor provides it and which business or consumer decisions it can influence,” that report said.
“For banks, maintaining an AI inventory may no longer be enough. Institutions will need to connect each entry to an accountable owner, documented purpose, risk classification, vendor relationship and set of controls. They also may need evidence showing that those controls work.”
Source: PYMNTS
