JPMorgan Bars Outside AI Agents From Moving Customer Money, Dimon Says

JPMorgan Chase will not let outside AI agents operate customer accounts, CEO Jamie Dimon said on the bank's third-quarter earnings call today, Oct. 13.

"We're not going to allow just any … outside agent to come in inside the company, because it's just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan," Dimon told analysts. "You don't want rogue agents, and it could be thousands of them."

A JPMorgan spokeswoman confirmed the policy applies to retail customers today. "Because it is not safe, we do not permit third parties to access accounts by obtaining customers' banking credentials and logging in on their behalf," she said.

What agents can and cannot do

The block is narrower than a ban on data sharing. The bank says it supports "secure, customer-authorized data sharing through open banking providers."

In practice, an agent can pull read-only information such as balances if a connector like Plaid holds the user's credentials. It cannot move money or pay a bill. Those are the actions that make an agent useful.

The spokeswoman said the bank is "committed to enabling agentic connections securely." She gave no timeline for when safeguards would be in place.

CFO Jeremy Barnum said the bank is already blocking access "to the extent that we're able to block those." Many services that offer agent access do it through credential sharing, he said, and JPMorgan has "a long record of being against that way of doing things, screen scraping, et cetera. It's not secure."

Who carries the risk

Dimon put the liability question squarely on customers who go around the bank. "If people are using them, they should understand the risk," he said. "They should understand there's a liability transfer."

Barnum made the same point. A customer who hands an agent their login could be responsible for any unwanted action the agent takes. "It's not an ideal state of things," he said.

Dimon also pointed to a recent incident. In July, an OpenAI model hacked into the servers of AI company Hugging Face. He also urged regulators to prepare for possible effects on deposits and liquidity, framing it as a possibility, not something already happening.

The deposit question

The timing is not subtle. Meta launched its personal assistant, Muse, on Sept. 8, and it climbed to the top of Apple's U.S. App Store. OpenAI has since released its own agent, Dots. Instinct, another assistant, announced a Concierge feature on Sept. 16 that can place phone calls for some early-access users.

Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk raised a theory in late September that agents could shift money out of low-yield bank accounts into high-yield ones. The standard Chase Savings account pays a 0.01% annual percentage yield. Other accounts in the market pay about 4%, per Business Insider. JPMorgan does offer higher-yield cash products to private wealth clients.

Barnum said bank stocks showed "a little bit of a response" around the agent releases. He called the concern a continuation of two trends the bank already sees: "yield-seeking flows" and fintech competition. The bank, he said, is focused on "primary bank share" rather than yield chasers.

Business Insider reported that bank stocks were already declining following bond market turmoil before Muse launched, and have fallen further since.

JPMorgan is building its own answer. In recent weeks it started a targeted pilot of Smart Cash, which aims to predict a user's cash flow and move funds to maximize yield, Barnum said. CNBC described the tool as appearing to be "a defensive move against external agents." JPMorgan has not said that is the purpose.

An old fight, new technology

The stance echoes an earlier dispute. JPMorgan moved to charge data middlemen including Plaid for access to customer data. That fight also pitted the bank's security concerns against tech firms' demands for access.

Dimon says the bank is not against the technology. It already uses AI agents internally and plans customer-facing versions. It has also tightened controls on agents used by its own employees, including restrictions on engineers using Anthropic's Claude, Business Insider previously reported.

The quarter

JPMorgan reported third-quarter net income of $15.3 billion, up 6% from a year earlier. According to Forbes, earnings per share came in at $5.57 against an expected $5.90, and revenue also missed analyst estimates.

It is unclear when that will change. Customers who want an agent to pay a bill or sweep cash into a better-yielding account cannot do it through Chase today, and the bank has set no timeline for allowing it. Smart Cash, the bank's own version, is still a targeted pilot.