This is the exact thing we’ve been warning about for years… AI agents with unrestrained access to your bank account and protected information. When consumer AI agents are accessing YOUR bank account or using YOUR credit card, they must be subject to fiduciary-like duties of care. We need to pass my AI AGENTS Act to get some basic guardrails in place.

There’s a world of difference between user-authorized agents (Muse, Instinct, Grokbot, etc.) and true unauthorized/rogue agents that could constitute cyberattacks. Most of the activity described in the Axios story appears to be the former: customers sharing credentials with agents so they can take actions on their behalf. This may violate bank terms requiring humans to log in themselves, but these are in no way cyberattacks. The direction banks should go is to support user-directed agents. For example, Amex is an authorized connection in Muse, making it easy for users to grant, limit, and revoke access. Read-only permission levels are a sensible interim step. Several banks already support or are moving toward them. Full write access (with user credentials) is a different risk category and should be approached carefully. Frightening the public by blurring the line between user-authorized agentic behavior and cyberattacks is irresponsible.

Agents that act on a consumer's behalf could turn a simple booking request into a payment liability dispute, says Steve Boms, Executive Director at @FDATAglobal. Steve gave a scenario. A consumer tells an AI assistant like Claude they need one ticket to Sydney next week and asks it to monitor prices and buy the moment the fare drops below a set number. The next morning, the consumer finds 20 tickets booked on their account. The first thing the consumer would do is call their bank and say they never authorized those purchases, because they asked for one ticket. The bank might then go to Anthropic and say it owes money, since the bank has a consent record from its customer. Anthropic could respond with the chat log, which says to buy as many tickets as are available. That creates a dispute. Under Reg Z and Reg E, the US rules covering liability for credit card and electronic payment disputes, the fundamental question is whether the consumer gave their access credentials over for those purchases, yes or no.