gizmodo.com
Some U.S. banks are, thankfully, blocking their clients from letting Meta’s Muse AI bot root around in their accounts. Even more thankfully, it appears relatively few people have been dumb enough to try.
Speaking to Bloomberg TV on Friday, Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster said the brokerage is actively blocking Muse from moving money because it poses unacceptable risks to the firm and its clients.
“We don’t want someone just giving their password to Muse, and letting Muse come in and take action on that client’s behalf. We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, something could go wrong and who’s liable?” Wurster said. “For the protection of the client and for the protection of us, we’re not allowing it.”
Wurster told Bloomberg that he personally receives data on AI agents that were detected and rejected on a weekly basis, and that this figure has yet to cross into the hundreds. Given that Muse collects entire dossiers of data on users and everyone they digitally interact with, potentially exposes users to exploitation, and has already had serious reported privacy issues like the time it handed out a home address to a stranger, this is probably for the best.
Wurster said, “I get a report on how many times we’ve blocked clients from using one of these agents in a week and it’s in the tens and twenties—per week—that the big agents are being blocked. What that tells me is that while people love AI, they’re not willing to turn their financial accounts over to them just yet.”
Earlier this week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told investors on an earnings call that the bank bans AI agents based on risk: “We’re not going to allow just any… outside agent to come in inside the company, because it’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan.” For now, a spokesperson told CNBC, this means any external agent for retail clients.
“You don’t want rogue agents, and it could be thousands of them,” Dimon added.
According to Bloomberg, Wurster did encourage the use of Charley, Schwab’s in-house AI assistant unveiled last month—Charley will only handle administrative and informational tasks out of the gate, not trading. Wurster told Yahoo Finance 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 leap too far.”
Wurster also told Bloomberg that Schwab is preparing to allow external LLM connections, but only through Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers with controlled authentication, and 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 research, they will be able to do that through their LLMs.” In an earnings call, he mentioned that Schwab does have a growing subset of clients “that are trading through LLMs and APIs,” and they can only submit requests through the firm’s APIs and MCP servers, where Schwab can control and verify interactions.
