US regulators increase scrutiny of AI risks in banking sector

America’s top bank regulators want to know what the robots are doing inside the vault. On October 13, 2026, the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) stepped up their oversight of how banks use advanced artificial intelligence models. The focus is cybersecurity, increasingly autonomous systems and whether humans can still pull the plug when something goes sideways. That last point is not a figure of speech. Regulators are specifically asking about kill switches, the emergency shutdown mechanisms meant to stop an AI system before it causes damage. What regulators are actually asking The three federal agencies are zeroing in on a few areas. One is the use of AI agents in cyber defense, where software is increasingly trusted to spot and respond to threats on its own. Another is how banks manage systems that make decisions with less and less human input. Regulators also want assurance that adequate human oversight exists. That includes mechanisms to prevent what the research describes as AI overreach, meaning a system acting beyond the scope it was given. Third-party technology dependencies are a major ...