Jamie Dimon Warns AI Agents That Make Payments on Your Behalf ‘May Not’ Act Properly: AI Revolution Like a ‘Tsunami’ That Must Be Managed

The phrase to savour is 'may not.' Jamie Dimon, asked about AI agents that make payments on your behalf, has concluded that they 'may not' act properly — which is the sentence you deploy when you suspect the dog has eaten the sofa but have not yet walked into the room to check. Not 'will not.' Not 'have not.' 'May not,' delivered with the gravity of a man who has read a risk register and wants the rest of us to know the box is only ticked provisionally. The agent gets your card details; the hedge gets the press conference.

Then the 'tsunami,' which must be 'managed' — a verb that in banking means a working group will be convened and somebody will produce a slide with a wave on it. Dimon's actual bill of particulars is stranger than the metaphor: AI tools are surfacing hundreds of significant vulnerabilities in open-source code, leaving 'industries completely unprotected' against state actors, terrorists and criminals. 'Hundreds' is a lovely number to say out loud and a dreadful one to hear, and note where they live — in the free stuff every bank, hospital and railway quietly runs on, maintained by three volunteers and a mailing list.

Best of all is the circularity. The AI is finding the holes in the very ecosystem its own adoption is widening. Companies bolting coding assistants into the pipeline now get to contend with 'code quality,' 'context' and the rising cost of AI-powered development — three nouns that between them explain most of the last two years of enterprise software. The vulnerabilities are in the hundreds, the protection is complete in its absence, and the tsunami is being managed. Somebody fetch the committee a nice sandwich.