The European Central Bank has ordered euro zone banks to develop comprehensive plans to counter AI-enabled cyber threats within four months, citing risks to financial system confidence and payment continuity.
The directive, announced Tuesday, requires institutions to address vulnerabilities that could be exploited by autonomous artificial intelligence agents.
The ECB emphasized that such threats could disrupt critical payment infrastructure, a concern heightened by recent technical failures in the central bank’s own Target2 (T2) system, which suffered its second outage in a week due to a software glitch.
This move aligns with a growing consensus among global central bankers regarding the stability risks posed by advanced algorithms.
The Bank of England recently warned that autonomous AI agents could precipitate a stock market crash, while the Bank for International Settlements has escalated concerns over the debt-financed spending boom in AI infrastructure.
The ECB’s mandate represents a concrete regulatory step to mitigate these systemic vulnerabilities.