Alex Stamos says giving AI agents your financial logins is ‘totally insane’

Handing an AI agent the passwords to your financial life is “totally insane”, says Alex Stamos. He is Meta’s former chief security officer. Stamos made the remarks on a recent episode of Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology Podcast, Natalie Musumeci reported for Business Insider.

Stamos joined Cognition as chief security officer in September. He said people give agents such as Meta’s Muse and Spear Street Technology’s Instinct their whole 1Password vaults. Then they ask the agents to “go handle my finances for me” or “go file my taxes”, he said.

Banks see bots with real logins

Banks now face a growing wave of bot activity that customers allow, Stamos said. The logins are “authenticated correctly”, he said. But the banks can see they “are clearly bots doing interaction”.

Stamos thinks Instinct is popular partly because it gets past the safeguards banks use to stop bots.

“That’s why Instinct is useful because it will effectively bypass the safety protections that are in place at these companies to keep you from doing exactly what you’re doing, which is to have your bot interact with the most important parts of your life,” Stamos said.

He described a “crazy tension”: banks try to “prevent automated access”, while customers hand their logins “to a company that’s existed for six months”.

What Meta, Instinct and the banks say

Instinct did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. Meta has said in a blog post that Muse runs on its own computer in the cloud. No other agent can access it, Meta says.

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon raised the same concern on the bank’s October earnings call. He spoke of a “liability transfer” away from the bank when customers let outside agents in. He also pointed to risks to their data.

“If people are using them, they should understand the risk,” Dimon said.

JPMorgan is building its own agent tools for clients, Dimon said. It is also guarding the bank against outside agents. US and European regulators have already questioned banks about AI agents and the cyber risks they bring.