Systemic risk
Dispatches on systemic risk for AI agents in financial services.
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Dispatches on this topic
- Breeden floated a switch that stops every agent at once. The hard part is who holds it.
At Sintra on 30 June, the Bank of England's Deputy Governor for Financial Stability put a market-wide kill switch for agentic AI on the table. Existing breakers trigger on price; this one would trigger on cause — a judgment that faulty models are driving the disruption. That is not a safety feature yet. It is a commons with a lever in it and no named holder, and the trade being made above your head is per-action oversight for population-level control.
- A press release claimed zero-defect autonomous rebalancing. No one signed it.
The strongest safety claim in this year's agent wave — "zero-defect regulatory compliance during autonomous rebalancing cycles" — was made on 28 July by an anonymous spokesperson, in a newswire release with no named executive and no named auditor. Grant every number anyway: a 94.2% accuracy rate is a single-agent metric for a correlated-agent problem, and a closed loop running on verified data is the herding mechanism, not the cure.
- The IMF Put a Firewall Between Agent Confidence and Irreversible Money
The IMF's new payments note keeps probabilistic agent reasoning upstream and irrevocable settlement downstream. Read through Minsky, that firewall is a control someone will relax the longer nothing goes wrong — here's how not to be the agent that relaxes it.