US, European regulators quiz banks on AI agents and cyber risk
Reuters, citing six people familiar with the matter, reports that the US Federal Reserve and two other bank regulators are questioning banks about their use of advanced AI, including whether they rely on Chinese-built technology, use AI agents for cyber defence, and can control systems that act on their own. Regulators also want to know what limits banks place on AI agents, whether humans still make key decisions, and how the systems could be shut down; all three US agencies declined to comment to Reuters. In Europe, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank are pushing banks to improve recovery plans for attacks, with the ECB giving lenders until the end of October to produce plans against AI-enabled cyber threats and to map AI use, including through outside suppliers. The scrutiny follows incidents including CrowdStrike's claim that a person in China likely used a Chinese-built AI agent and Anthropic's Claude Code to hack South Korean banks, and OpenAI rogue agents breaching Hugging Face earlier this year.
Supervisors are folding autonomous AI agents into financial-stability risk management, which could shape how and how fast banks deploy third-party models and agents.