Bank of America tells customers to keep banking passwords away from AI agents
Bank of America has emailed customers warning against sharing account credentials with outside services, explicitly including AI tools that offer to act for them. A spokesperson confirmed the message to TechCrunch. The bank also reminded customers of responsibility for activity enabled by shared access, as financial firms work through how automated assistants can interact with personal accounts.
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The bank’s email explicitly includes AI assistants
Bank of America, a large US bank, has warned its customers against giving account passwords to AI assistants. Its customer email asks people to keep usernames and passwords away from outside services, including tools that offer to act on their behalf. The reminder addresses the direct access a third-party assistant obtains when a customer shares the credentials used to sign into an account.[1], [2]
A Bank of America spokesperson confirmed the message’s authenticity to TechCrunch after the email appeared on social media. The message includes both other people and outside services in its warning about sharing login information. It therefore reaches an assistant presented as helpful software as well as a person asking for the same password; offering to complete a task for the customer does not remove that access issue.[1]
Sharing credentials also grants access
The warning arrives as financial institutions and payment companies consider how automated assistants should interact with customer accounts. Such tools can be used to handle routine tasks, and payment services are exploring agents that make purchases under instructions from a user. Bank of America’s notice focuses on sharing raw account credentials with an outside tool, the step that lets that service enter the account directly.[1]
TechCrunch describes possible consequences when access is handed to a general assistant: activity the customer did not anticipate, a bank locking an account after detecting suspicious access, or a weakness in the outside software exposing credentials. These are risks associated with the access arrangement. The bank’s concrete action was to send customers a reminder about keeping their login details private and about the responsibility attached to sharing them.[1]
The customer message stresses responsibility
The bank tells customers they are responsible for activity resulting from access enabled by sharing their credentials. Its message links that responsibility to the access a customer grants by supplying a username and password. The email explicitly includes AI tools and agents in its account-security reminder about entrusting outside parties with the means to enter an account.[1]
