Central bankers sound alarms over agentic AI finance risks

European regulators and central bankers have warned that rulemaking cannot keep pace with rapid advances in agentic artificial intelligence and have called for guardrails to protect the financial system. 

Bank of England deputy governor Sarah Breeden is one of several central bankers who have said that agentic AI could amplify volatility during bouts of market stress.

Breeden questioned if guardrails are needed, “analogous to circuit breakers or kill switches that would limit or stop trading market-wide if faulty AI models cause market meltdown,” she said at the European Central Bank’s annual meeting in Sintra, Portugal, on Tuesday.

US companies are leading in AI investment and frontier model development, and Europe’s financial system gives it fewer capital channels into AI compared to the US equity markets. Regulating too cautiously could widen that gap further, as AI companies may seek out jurisdictions with lower compliance requirements.

Cybersecurity and financial risk warnings 

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, in an interview with French outlet Les Echos on Thursday, warned that AI technology poses a “major risk.” 

“For about a decade now, we have been talking about cybersecurity risks, hacking, data theft, and so on,” Lagarde said. “But with the acceleration and deepening of AI models, we are confronted with a much more serious risk, because it is happening very, very quickly, and because the means of defense — and the funding required for them — have yet to be found.”

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Meanwhile, Nikhil Rathi, CEO of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Thursday that traditional regulation cycles don’t work in an era of fast-moving AI development.

“Technology moves incredibly fast, and we need to think differently about some of the innovations that we are seeing on AI,” Rathi said.

“The reality is some of these technologies now move in weeks or months, and the traditional cycle of rulemaking simply doesn’t work in that way, so we need to think about new tools and a different way of working with the market in a more collaborative way.” 

Central bankers, especially in Europe, have raised the same red flags about crypto, claiming that it could disrupt the traditional financial system. 

Bankers warn of AI boom-bust risk

The Bank for International Settlements warned on June 28 that AI “exuberance” could have major financial consequences.

If central banks tighten policy to contain inflation, this could precipitate a “sharp pullback in [AI] asset prices after a prolonged period of exuberant risk-taking,” which could trigger “disruptive macro-financial feedback loops,” the BIS said. 

Breeden said that debt financing was rising rapidly. “We therefore judged that the financial stability consequences of any fall in AI-related asset prices could well increase,” she said. 

Meanwhile, Tobias Adrian, Director of the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, said in an interview with Bloomberg on June 30 that there is a “potential maturity mismatch in between the duration of the physical assets and the duration of the debt.”

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