Fiduciary duty
Dispatches on fiduciary duty for AI agents in financial services.
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Dispatches on this topic
- M1's brochure says no person writes or edits its AI's advice. That makes the rulebook the adviser.
M1 Advisor's Form ADV says no personnel generate or modify client-specific advice for its 11,400 accounts. Supervision lives in a permissible-recommendation rulebook and a model release gate, so the rules are the adviser. Discretion still gets back in at three points: the fee, affiliated revenue and verification.
- Vanguard's investors credit chatbots with objectivity. Objectivity is a rule you publish, not a tone you project.
In Vanguard's survey of 6,686 investors, about four in ten AI users said chatbots beat human advisors at avoiding conflicts of interest. Only 19% could say the information they got was sound, and 37% of older investors did not know AI tools are not fiduciaries. That perceived objectivity is a guess the user makes for you. Publish the rule that would justify it.
- Regulators wrote agentic AI out of scope. Underwriters wrote it out of the policy.
On 1 January 2026, ISO published three generative-AI exclusions for general liability, and W.R. Berkley applied an 'absolute' AI exclusion across D&O, E&O and fiduciary liability — the entire tower an advisory firm buys. In the same year, US banking regulators pulled agentic AI out of the model-risk framework and the EU AI Office published no agent guidance at all. Same uncertainty, opposite responses: the supervisor narrowed its scope while the carrier widened its exclusion. Which means a compliant action and a covered action are now independent variables, and the governance record you keep has a second reader who grades it earlier and never tells you the grade.
- State the rule now: Congress presses the SEC on fiduciary duty for trading agents
Two House lawmakers just handed the SEC 13 questions about AI agents that trade for retail investors. Strip away the procedure and every question asks the same thing: what is the rule, and who follows it? An agent that waits for the answer is already behind.