This is most likely actual customers deliberately giving their agents access.

Which is an interesting problem, what happens when the agent fucks up and the customer loses lots of money? Who is responsible?

If the official policy is "no agents", it shifts the blame.

Yeap. Most likely Muse, Grok Bot and things like that.

Honestly, US banks and credit unions should get their heads out of their asses and learn from it. There's a _reason_ people connect banks to YNAB, Monarch Money and stuff like that, and a reason why they might want an AI agent. They need the info. They may also need to make automated transactions, something companies have access to, but the ordinary person does not.

My landlord wants Zelle. I cannot schedule payments on my credit union. It's not like I can update the app since it lives inside their systems. So I have to login monthly. I debated getting another bank account and giving it to Muse just for that purpose.

Banks in the US are a couple of decades behind, say, Brazilian banks. Instant transfers to another bank were a thing since the early 2000s. And for years now you can do it from anyone to anyone, no third party app required. To the dismay of Visa and Mastercard.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. If the customer set the agent in motion, the customer is no less responsible for the damage than someone that (as i think Cal Newport said) ties a weedwacker to a dog. It’s reckless.

If they were sold a product that claimed to be safe, they could in turn sue whoever sold it to them. Jeep’s insurance wouldn’t pay someone I crashed into because of defect in my jeep, but I could in turn sue Jeep for my legal trouble.

Banks have had a long standing policy that if you willing hand over your credentials, you are responsible for any losses. This applies to AI agents as well as scammers.

It used to be the case that the average person didn't "know enough to get into trouble" when it came to software. But now that's not even necessary. I can imagine a layman asking Muse or some other agent something mundane like "why can't I transfer from Bank A to Bank B?" and unwittingly sending it down a rabbit hole where it's trying to gather sensitive info from places that consumers aren't intended to be able to access. Ultimately, it's just exposing pre-existing vulnerabilities. But the job of infosec definitely has gotten, and will continue to get, much harder I think.

If a peasant breaks rules and loses money, it's their fault.

If a connected person breaks rules and loses money, it's someone else's fault.

I don't make the rules, I just break them.

I don't understand why this is considered a security incident. Human behavior incident, sure, but this is not a vulnerability.

User fault. Easy.

Where's the interest? It's the customer's fault.

the official policy is: whoever has the least number of lawyers and most number of lobbiests.

None of that has changed.

Citi becomes latest US bank to restrict AI agents from accessing accounts - https://www.ft.com/content/f49c8e39-f07f-4177-9948-aabe55e5e... | https://archive.today/0AlZP

Part of it is "human in the loop" for write actions, part of it is commercial banks are deathly terrified of agents being able to move deposits around rapidly to maximize yield, as those deposits are cheap cost of capital banks use to lend against. Historically, deposits of unsophisticated financial services consumers were sticky, and that assumption is breaking down. Agents can be consumer copilots towards information asymmetry in this context.

"computah, maximize rate of return, minimize interest expenses, manage cashflow, make no mistakes."