The Bank of England is reviewing whether existing rules can cover the use of agentic AI in finance, including payments, trading, cybersecurity, and operations.
Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden said existing regulatory frameworks were not designed for AI agents that can act without direct human instruction. Speaking at the European Central Bank Forum on central banking in Portugal, she said relying on human oversight for every action by these systems is unlikely to be practical.
Breeden said current frameworks were not built to contemplate autonomous agents in payments, trading, and operational functions.
Agentic AI enters financial workflows
Agentic AI refers to systems that can make decisions and carry out tasks independently. In finance, such systems are already being used in areas such as product recommendations, operational workflows, and trading-related tasks.
Agentic systems differ from traditional automated trading tools because they can pursue objectives and make decisions with less direct human supervision. Breeden said these systems could act in similar ways if they are trained on similar data or designed around similar goals.
Breeden said recent advances in AI models for identifying cyber vulnerabilities show a change in capability. She said agentic AI systems can chain together sequences of actions at scale and speed.
A 2026 Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance report found that 81% of surveyed financial services firms are adopting AI at some level. It also found that 52% of industry respondents are already actively adopting agentic AI.
The report said most current use remains focused on internal functions, including process automation, data visualisation, software engineering, and knowledge management. Breeden said use in trading is still mostly concentrated in lower-risk operational tasks.
BoE flags cyber resilience risks
Breeden described cyber resilience as one of the Bank of England’s closest financial stability concerns around agentic AI. She said the technology has undergone a “step change” in cyber capability and that supervisors need to look at risks across the financial system rather than only at individual firms.
She said AI tools can strengthen cyber defences when used by security teams. The immediate risk, she added, is that the same tools could increase the chance of attacks that harm financial stability if used by malicious actors.
Breeden also noted that open-source models may trail the most advanced closed models by only four to eight months. She said this gives authorities only limited comfort, despite restrictions on the release of some advanced models.
The IMF has also warned that AI-enabled cyber risk should be treated as a financial stability issue. It said attacks can scale quickly, spread across sectors that share digital infrastructure, and create wider disruption if several institutions are affected at once.
Breeden said authorities should place greater weight on simultaneous disruption across several firms and…
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