JPMorgan Chase blocks outside AI agents like Muse, Instinct from directly accessing accounts

JPMorgan Chase won't allow outside artificial intelligence agents to access customer accounts and operate on their behalf, CEO Jamie Dimon said Tuesday, citing risks to the company and its customers as tech firms including Meta release autonomous assistants.

"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 on the bank's third-quarter earnings call.

"You don't want rogue agents, and it could be thousands of them," he added, describing the potential threat to customers. In July, an OpenAI model hacked into AI company Hugging Face's servers.

The stance from Dimon, the longtime CEO of the biggest U.S. bank by assets and a de facto spokesman for the U.S. financial sector, is reminiscent of an earlier fight with fintech firms over access to customer data. JPMorgan moved to charge data middlemen including Plaid for access, a dispute that similarly pitted the bank's security concerns against tech firms' demands for access.

A JPMorgan spokeswoman confirmed to CNBC that the bank currently blocks external AI agents from operating on behalf of retail customers.

"Protecting our customers is our top priority. 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," the spokeswoman said.

"We support secure, customer-authorized data sharing through open banking providers and are committed to enabling agentic connections securely," she added.

That means that AI agents can access some customer data from Chase accounts in a read-only fashion, such as customer balances, if Plaid or another connector has the user's credentials. But they can't send money or pay a bill — actions that make an agent useful.