⚡ In the space of a week, five U.S. financial giants drew the same line for AI agents: they can look, but they can’t move money
Meta released Muse on September 8. Twelve days later, Amazon blocked it from the checkout page, saying it was using customers’ credentials without authorization. First the shopping cart was shut off. Then the accounts.
From October 13 to 16, earnings reports from several of America’s biggest financial institutions landed in the same week. JPMorgan’s Dimon said he wouldn’t let just any external agent into the company’s systems: “You don’t know if there are going to be thousands of rogue agents.” Citi’s statement was even firmer: third-party AI agents are not allowed to log into customer accounts or make transactions directly through its online banking service. Bank of America’s Moynihan wants a human in the loop; someone has to approve the step that sends money out. Wells Fargo didn’t close the door—it changed its online banking agreement.
Schwab was the most specific. On the company’s October 15 earnings call, CEO Rick Wurster said it was blocking agents that log in on customers’ behalf. The next day, on Bloomberg TV, he put a number on it: he gets a report every week on blocked attempts, with major agents blocked dozens of times. Dozens.
He also offered alternatives. One is Charley, Schwab’s in-house assistant, launched on September 30 and rolling out in stages from October. For now, it can only handle things like changing an address or designating an emergency contact. The other is an MCP server, which lets external large language models connect to check balances and do research; traders in the pilot can also place orders. Transfers are off limits.
The reasoning holds up. If you hand over your password, the bank can’t tell whether there’s a person or a program on the other end, and responsibility becomes hard to untangle if something goes wrong. As Wurster put it: “We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, and if something goes wrong, who’s responsible?”
The numbers add up, too. Schwab reported $3.48 billion in net interest income in the third quarter, with $492.8 billion in customer cash sitting in accounts. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo hold a combined $1.6 trillion in non-interest-bearing deposits. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok has estimated that at 3%, if agents moved that money into interest-bearing accounts, the three banks would lose about $47 billion in annual revenue. That’s an upper bound, not a forecast.
The security concern is real. So is the aligned incentive: both point in the same direction, and from the outside, it’s impossible to tell which one is driving the decision.
For crypto, the signal is where the door is. An agent with its own wallet doesn’t need to borrow anyone’s password; it can sign a transaction and settle it, with no login step in between. Banks are closing off the credential-based route, not getting rid of agents themselves.
Responsibility hasn’t disappeared. It has shifted from the bank to whoever holds the keys. Hand an agent a hot-wallet key, and Wurster’s words apply to someone else: I can’t control it, and neither can you.
As I write this, BTC is quoted between $82,246 and $82,330 across four sources, up 0.3% over 24 hours. ETH is between $2,417 and $2,420, essentially flat.
Whoever keeps the permission to write is where the money will grow. Banks are keeping that permission at their own counters, so the agent economy can only move along the track that doesn’t require logging in.
$BTC $ETH
#中本聪国际社区Baoluo币商资本 #加密货币 #AI agents
Meta released Muse on September 8. Twelve days later, Amazon blocked it from the checkout page, saying it was using customers’ credentials without authorization. First the shopping cart was shut off. Then the accounts.
From October 13 to 16, earnings reports from several of America’s biggest financial institutions landed in the same week. JPMorgan’s Dimon said he wouldn’t let just any external agent into the company’s systems: “You don’t know if there are going to be thousands of rogue agents.” Citi’s statement was even firmer: third-party AI agents are not allowed to log into customer accounts or make transactions directly through its online banking service. Bank of America’s Moynihan wants a human in the loop; someone has to approve the step that sends money out. Wells Fargo didn’t close the door—it changed its online banking agreement.
Schwab was the most specific. On the company’s October 15 earnings call, CEO Rick Wurster said it was blocking agents that log in on customers’ behalf. The next day, on Bloomberg TV, he put a number on it: he gets a report every week on blocked attempts, with major agents blocked dozens of times. Dozens.
He also offered alternatives. One is Charley, Schwab’s in-house assistant, launched on September 30 and rolling out in stages from October. For now, it can only handle things like changing an address or designating an emergency contact. The other is an MCP server, which lets external large language models connect to check balances and do research; traders in the pilot can also place orders. Transfers are off limits.
The reasoning holds up. If you hand over your password, the bank can’t tell whether there’s a person or a program on the other end, and responsibility becomes hard to untangle if something goes wrong. As Wurster put it: “We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, and if something goes wrong, who’s responsible?”
The numbers add up, too. Schwab reported $3.48 billion in net interest income in the third quarter, with $492.8 billion in customer cash sitting in accounts. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo hold a combined $1.6 trillion in non-interest-bearing deposits. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok has estimated that at 3%, if agents moved that money into interest-bearing accounts, the three banks would lose about $47 billion in annual revenue. That’s an upper bound, not a forecast.
The security concern is real. So is the aligned incentive: both point in the same direction, and from the outside, it’s impossible to tell which one is driving the decision.
For crypto, the signal is where the door is. An agent with its own wallet doesn’t need to borrow anyone’s password; it can sign a transaction and settle it, with no login step in between. Banks are closing off the credential-based route, not getting rid of agents themselves.
Responsibility hasn’t disappeared. It has shifted from the bank to whoever holds the keys. Hand an agent a hot-wallet key, and Wurster’s words apply to someone else: I can’t control it, and neither can you.
As I write this, BTC is quoted between $82,246 and $82,330 across four sources, up 0.3% over 24 hours. ETH is between $2,417 and $2,420, essentially flat.
Whoever keeps the permission to write is where the money will grow. Banks are keeping that permission at their own counters, so the agent economy can only move along the track that doesn’t require logging in.
$BTC $ETH
#中本聪国际社区Baoluo币商资本 #加密货币 #AI agents