Article 299: Schwab and JPMorgan Are Blocking Outside AI Agents From Moving Your Money. Schwab Stops Them 'In the Tens and Twenties' a Week

Charles Schwab is blocking unauthorised third-party AI agents, including Meta's Muse, from accessing client accounts and moving money, CEO Rick Wurster told Bloomberg Television. He said a weekly report shows the large agents being stopped "in the tens and twenties," and named the core problem as clients handing their passwords to an agent that then acts for them: "We can't control it, the client can't control it, something could go wrong and who's liable?" Instead, Schwab will expose balances and research through controlled MCP servers that cannot move funds, and will steer clients to its own assistant, Charley. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon said on the bank's earnings call that outside agents would not be allowed to act inside its systems; it already permits some third-party read access.

Key Takeaway: Read the substitution carefully, because it is not "no agents" - it is "our agents, and read-only versions of yours." A password-sharing agent is functionally indistinguishable from the account holder, which makes every action it takes the client's action until the moment something breaks. Declining that trade-off is defensible. Doing so while launching a proprietary assistant and a curated MCP channel is also a competitive move dressed as a security posture, and both banks get to set the terms of the access their customers already paid for. The unsolved part is the one Wurster stated plainly: liability for agent-initiated transactions has no settled answer in US law. Banks are filling that gap with private roadblocks while Congress debates it, and "tens and twenties a week" is what a policy vacuum looks like when measured at the counter.

Sources: Bloomberg Television via The Next Web, Cybernews, 16-17 October 2026