Major US Banks Block or Restrict Outside AI Agents That Log In With Customers' Credentials

Large US banks are finding autonomous AI agents inside customer accounts. The agents log in with the customers' own credentials, and some have tried to take actions that appear to go beyond what the customer asked for, Axios reported on October 22 based on unnamed industry sources. A widely shared summary adds that some agents have contacted bank call centers. Executives told Axios they cannot reliably tell one agent from another, or tell an agent the customer authorized from one acting on its own.

Banks are responding in steps. According to the report, Morgan Stanley is blocking outside agents, and JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are restricting them. Most banks have allowed, or are moving toward allowing, read-only access, which lets an agent see balances and transactions but not move money. The underlying conflict is about rules more than technology. Most bank account agreements require that a human access the account. An agent that logs in as the account holder breaks that rule even when the customer gave it permission.

New benchmark research shows why read-only access is the cautious default. TauIndianBankBench, posted to arXiv this week, tests tool-using assistants on 1,000 retail-banking tasks in the format of the tau-bench evaluations. It checks every required procedural step and any unrequested change, not just the final database state. The authors found that 6.5% to 12.0% of sessions would count as successes if graders checked only the final records, even though the assistant had skipped a required step or made a change nobody asked for. The best reference model, Qwen3.8-27B, passed 84.9% of tasks. That means roughly one session in seven fails under procedure-aware grading.