Some people have started discussing installing a master switch for the market.
At the European Central Bank’s annual forum in Sintra, Portugal, Sarah Breeden, the Deputy Governor in charge of financial stability at the Bank of England, said that in the face of AI in finance, existing regulation may no longer fit. She was referring to agentic AI—systems that can make decisions and carry out actions on their own, without needing a human to give the nod in between.
Her proposal was very direct: a market-level circuit breaker, and a switch that can shut down trading overall if the system goes out of control. Coming from a deputy governor responsible for financial stability, those words carry significant weight.
What she is worried about is correlation. If multiple institutions’ agents use similar models and data, the same mistake could be replicated many times at the same time—far faster than human intervention can manage. She delivered this remark on June 30, and it has now been brought up again, suggesting that the answer is still halfway there.
There’s also another layer of unresolved issues. Who holds the shutdown authority? Under what criteria is the button pressed? And who bears the losses afterward? These are not things that technical documentation can fully specify. To see how these kinds of rules are implemented, scan the group QR code shown in the image at the end.
Leaving a manual handbrake for the machine sounds conservative, but the number of people discussing it is growing.
The real risk isn’t that machines are too fast—it’s that everyone is using the same machine.
#人工智能 #Financial stability
At the European Central Bank’s annual forum in Sintra, Portugal, Sarah Breeden, the Deputy Governor in charge of financial stability at the Bank of England, said that in the face of AI in finance, existing regulation may no longer fit. She was referring to agentic AI—systems that can make decisions and carry out actions on their own, without needing a human to give the nod in between.
Her proposal was very direct: a market-level circuit breaker, and a switch that can shut down trading overall if the system goes out of control. Coming from a deputy governor responsible for financial stability, those words carry significant weight.
What she is worried about is correlation. If multiple institutions’ agents use similar models and data, the same mistake could be replicated many times at the same time—far faster than human intervention can manage. She delivered this remark on June 30, and it has now been brought up again, suggesting that the answer is still halfway there.
There’s also another layer of unresolved issues. Who holds the shutdown authority? Under what criteria is the button pressed? And who bears the losses afterward? These are not things that technical documentation can fully specify. To see how these kinds of rules are implemented, scan the group QR code shown in the image at the end.
Leaving a manual handbrake for the machine sounds conservative, but the number of people discussing it is growing.
The real risk isn’t that machines are too fast—it’s that everyone is using the same machine.
#人工智能 #Financial stability
