Unauthorized AI agents reportedly access U.S. bank accounts as Meta promotes Muse
Axios: unauthorized AI agents accessed U.S. bank accounts, prompting bank curbs; Meta pushes Muse for agent-led commerce
Citing unnamed sources at several banks, Axios said the institutions have tracked agent activity and found agents contacting call centers without specific permission. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo have moved quickly to contain the risk, according to the report; some have blocked third-party agents from their platforms, others have imposed restrictions in certain cases, and many are trying to limit agents to read-only access so they cannot make changes.
A Chase spokesperson told Axios that customers should not give their usernames and passwords to anyone, including AI agents. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned in a recent earnings call that thousands of rogue agents could be operating across financial platforms, according to the report.
The report said most banks require humans to log in to their own accounts, a requirement that AI agents built to act on a user’s behalf can complicate. It also said consumers are unlikely to recover money if an agent makes a mistake, because banks would treat the action as voluntary and not fraud under laws such as the U.S. Electronic Fund Transfer Act.
Meta’s plans were laid out on Wednesday night’s third-quarter earnings call. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he sees a future in which “billions” of people use Muse, the personal AI agent Meta released to the public last month, and those users’ Muses talk to and transact with other people’s Muses in a “large-scale Muse network.”
Zuckerberg described Muse as an “extremely capable” personal agent that can help users “save time, save money, build a business, create new things, or anything else that you can dream of.” He said the ecosystem could work with friends and family and, when a user wants to buy something, talk to a business’s agent rather than merely navigate to its website. He predicted Muse would be “highly profitable” within a few years and could eventually generate more revenue per user for Meta than Instagram and Facebook.
Meta offered few operational details. Zuckerberg said Muse had been downloaded and set up by more than 10 million users in the U.S. and Canada, making it one of Meta’s “most successful launches ever,” and that a quarter of those initial downloaders use it daily. He did not share retention figures. A quarter of Muse users are shopping through the platform and spending more than $200 per purchase on average, he said; Meta earns a fee on every commercial transaction on Muse, which is expected to remain free for consumers while businesses cover transaction fees.
Security questions remain part of the picture. Meta did not detail how the Muse network would work in practice. In September, a YouTuber said his Muse agent sent a stranger to his home in the middle of the night while arranging a Facebook Marketplace transaction on his behalf, and there have been reports of agents leaking content from users’ private conversations. Meta said at Muse’s launch that it was “built for privacy and security from the ground up.”
A Canadian bank executive told Bloomberg earlier this week that the bank would consider blocking Muse from accessing customers’ financial data. On the earnings call, when an investor asked about “friction points” in getting businesses to adopt the Muse plan, Meta CFO Susan Li said: “Agents are going to be an important part of how reality evolves, and everyone is just going to have to adapt.”