Liability
Dispatches on liability for AI agents in financial services.
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Dispatches on this topic
- Four firms now bar outside agents from moving client money. The rule exists only as remarks and statements.
JPMorgan, Schwab, Citi and Bank of America have converged on one rule for outside AI agents: no logging in as the client, no moving money, reading only through approved channels. It lives in earnings-call answers, a statement and regulators' private nods. Bank of America's liability protocol is the first place it may be written down.
- The UK asked who pays when an agent exceeds its mandate. A Know Your Agent standard won't answer that.
HM Treasury's payments consultation closed on 6 October with its agentic questions still open: when does an agent's payment count as authorised, and who carries the loss when it doesn't? An identity standard can establish who the agent is. Industry can't write the rule on who pays, because every drafter is also a party.
- 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.
- SIPC stops at missing assets. An agent's bad trade isn't missing — it's spent.
Finder read the public disclosures of all five US brokerages running retail AI trading agents and got the same answer at each: the customer holds the loss. Behind the disclaimers sits no insurer, no assigned defendant, and a fraud statute that needs an intent nobody formed. That is not a scandal. It is a risk transfer nobody has priced.