Bank of England’s Breeden questions adequacy of AI regulations, proposes kill switches for financial markets

Sarah Breeden, the Bank of England’s Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, told an audience of central bankers and policymakers that existing regulations may no longer be fit for purpose when it comes to artificial intelligence in finance. Speaking at the European Central Bank’s annual forum in Sintra, Portugal on June 30, Breeden specifically targeted “agentic AI,” the class of autonomous systems that make decisions and execute actions without a human in the loop. Her proposed solution is about as dramatic as regulatory language gets: market-wide circuit breakers and kill switches capable of shutting down trading entirely if an AI system goes haywire. The problem with robots that don’t ask permission Agentic AI is different from the chatbot your bank uses to answer questions about overdraft fees. These systems autonomously execute trades, process payments, and make commercial decisions at speeds no human could match. Breeden warned that correlated AI agents, meaning multiple autonomous systems trained on similar data and pursuing similar strategies, could amplify market volatility during periods of stress. A survey from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance found that ro...