Central bankers sound alarms over agentic AI finance risks

“We need to think about new tools and a different way of working with the [AI] market in a more collaborative way,” says Nikhil Rathi, CEO of the UK’s finance watchdog.

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.