Fortunately, some US banks are preventing their customers from letting Meta’s Muse AI bot take hold in their accounts. Fortunately again, it seems that relatively few people were stupid enough to try.
Speaking to Bloomberg TV on Friday, Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster said the brokerage was actively blocking Muse from moving money because it posed unacceptable risks to the company and its clients.
“We don’t want someone to just give Muse their password and let Muse step in and act on behalf of that client. We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, something could go wrong and who’s responsible?” » said Wurster. “For the protection of the customer and for our protection, we do not allow this.”
Wurster told Bloomberg that he personally receives data on AI agents detected and rejected every week, and that the number has not yet reached the hundreds. Given that Muse collects entire dossiers of data on users and everyone they interact with digitally, potentially exposes users to exploitation, and has already had serious privacy issues reported, like the time it gave a stranger a home address, this is probably for the best.
Wurster said: “I get a report on how many times we’ve blocked customers from using one of these agents in a week and it’s in the tens and twenties (per week) that the big agents are blocked. What that tells me is that even though people like AI, they’re not yet ready to trust them with their financial accounts.”
Earlier this week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told investors on a conference call that the bank was banning AI agents based on risk: “We’re not going to allow just any outside agent to come into the business because it’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan.” For now, a spokesperson told CNBC, that means any external agent for retail clients.
“You don’t want rogue agents, and there could be thousands of them,” Dimon added.
According to Bloomberg, Wurster has encouraged the use of Charley, Schwab’s in-house AI assistant unveiled last month: Charley will only handle administrative and informational tasks, not transactions. Wurster told Yahoo Finance that AI could play a role in helping clients research stocks and set up trading processes, but allowing AI agents to make decisions without human approval is “a step too far.”
Wurster also told Bloomberg that Schwab is preparing to allow external LLM connections, but only through MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers with controlled authentication, and that their actions will be restricted: “We’re not going to allow them to move money, but if they want to come in and see their account balances and do some research, they’ll be able to do that through their LLMs.” On an earnings call, he mentioned that Schwab has a growing subset of clients “who trade through LLMs and APIs,” and that they can only submit requests through the company’s APIs and MCP servers, where Schwab can monitor and verify interactions.
Gn bussni
