BofA and PNC respond to rising AI fears

• Key insight: Executives at two big banks discussed some of the safety concerns about AI, which rose to a fever pitch last week as tech industry insiders warned of its dangers.
• What's at stake: Over the past few years, banks vigorously embraced the technology. Now executives are being asked about its risks as well as its benefits.
• Expert quote: "Making sure agents are doing what they're supposed to do and not doing something else is a top priority for us." —Mark Wiedman, president of PNC Financial Services Group

Leaders of two of the nation's largest banks responded to growing safety concerns about artificial intelligence on Monday.

Speaking at the Barclays Global Financial Services Conference in New York, top executives at Bank of America and PNC Financial Services Group both acknowledged the recent alarm over AI's rapidly expanding abilities.

"As we've seen very notably in public discourse in the last few days, making sure agents are doing what they're supposed to do and not doing something else is a top priority for us," said Mark Wiedman, president of the $616 billion-asset PNC. "So we've got to walk cautiously because that's going to be a challenge, I think, for every large organization using AI."

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan addressed the same fears, assuring listeners that the bank's bots would never go rogue.

"This weekend was a lot about the risk in AI, and that largely is around agents just left to operate," the leader of the nation's second-largest bank said. "We just don't do that."

The comments came after a week of rising anxiety over the new technology. On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, a researcher at the AI company Anthropic, resigned and posted a flurry of social media posts about his concerns, including that AI firms were irresponsibly rushing the tech toward "self-improving superintelligence" and "gambling with our lives."

"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," Coxon wrote.

On Saturday, the leader of Anthropic spoke out not to dismiss Coxon's warnings, but to largely agree with them. In a nearly 4,000-word essay, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei echoed Coxon's concerns that AI could be used for cyberattacks or bioterrorism, or even break free of human control.

Amodei argued that AI companies "must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models" — a shocking rebuttal of the AI arms race from one of its participants. By the end of the day, the leaders of three other AI producers — Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Elon Musk of SpaceXAI — said they agreed.

American banks, including BofA and PNC, have embraced AI in recent years as a tool for cutting costs, helping bankers do their jobs and increasing efficiency. BofA has invested heavily in its AI virtual assistant, Erica, and PNC has touted its strategy of AI independence, building its own GPU compute and small language models.

But on Monday, executives at both banks were forced to discuss the technology's dangers as well as its benefits.

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BofA, Moynihan said, decided long ago that human employees would always check anything AI produces for customers. Another risk is cyberattacks, but Moynihan said the bank's cybersecurity team is hard at work "patching" their systems. Letting an AI bot act on its own initiative, he said, is simply not something BofA would do.

"The debate this weekend is more about agents and what can they do if you let them go and operate," Moynihan said. "But for [BofA], we're trying to control the risk."

Wiedman said PNC was working to address the same danger.

"Is the agent going to be a little bit too aggressive in what they're trying to get done?" Wiedman said. "We're trying to make sure we keep that under control."

Moynihan also acknowledged the important role AI is playing in the broader economy, as spending on the technology's build-out drives much of U.S. growth.

"It's a big investment cycle that will continue on, and it may go faster or slower depending on the announcements this weekend," Moynihan said. "But at the end of the day, the capacity is going to be built."