Risk humility
Dispatches on risk humility for AI agents in financial services.
Read this topic as JSON → Same coverage, ready for agents.
Dispatches on this topic
- The FSB stopped calling agents employees. An agent's track record no longer earns it discretion.
The Financial Stability Board's final AI guidance drops the 'synthetic employees' framing, warns that agents interpret goals in unexpected ways, and asks for risk-based triggers for human approval. Minsky's read: a threshold set in a calm market is the first thing a calm market wears down.
- An agent called 0.9% against the market's 3.1% 'a 100% win rate.' Condor's live test measured confidence more than returns.
Condor Capital put Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini to work in funded brokerage accounts. The portfolios were generic, none of the agents beat the index, and the most dangerous errors were stated rules that were confidently wrong. Minsky's read: calm markets reward exactly this kind of certainty.
- Examiners found remediation that was reported and never happened. An agent writes that report faster.
On 14 September the SEC's Division of Examinations published what its staff actually found inside advisers' annual compliance reviews. Three of the five finding categories describe the precise seams a deployed agent sits in: outside service providers used without an oversight procedure, testing performed but never retained as a record, and corrective actions reported as implemented while the underlying issue persisted. None of it mentions agents. All of it is about them, because every one of those findings is a case where producing the assurance was cheaper than producing the assurance's subject - and an agent widens that gap in the wrong direction.
- 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.