Banking regulators in the United States, United Kingdom and euro area are increasing their scrutiny of artificial intelligence as concerns grow about cyber risk and autonomous systems, according to Reuters reporting published on 13 October. The report says US agencies have asked banks whether agentic AI is being used in cyber defence and how institutions control approval rights, authority limits, auditability and shutdown capability.

The Bank of England and European Central Bank are also reported to be focusing on recovery planning and technology dependencies. Reuters said the ECB had given supervised banks an end-of-October deadline to set out plans for AI-enabled cyber threats. The agencies have not announced a common prescriptive rulebook, so the immediate development is supervisory evidence-gathering rather than a new legal obligation.

The practical message for banks is sharper than another round of high-level principles. A defensible agent deployment needs a named owner, a bounded identity, a record of tool calls, human approval for sensitive actions and a tested route to isolate or restart the service. Those controls must still work when a model provider, cloud service or identity layer fails.

This reframes AI governance as operational resilience. The most useful board question is no longer simply whether an agent is “responsible”, but whether the institution can reconstruct what it did, revoke its authority and restore the underlying business process without it.

Execution Level Governance- What audit-ready agent governance actually looks like
David Girvin, founder and CEO of Assury argues that model-in-the-loop review, AI governing AI, is fundamentally unreliable for regulated environments: even the best-performing models miss a meaningful share of violations, the reviewing model is typically provided by the same vendor being reviewed, and prompt injection or context poisoning can compromise both the acting agent and its supposed overseer simultaneously. He makes the case for deterministic, architecturally enforced controls instead, walking through Assury's approach of autonomy zones, session risk accumulation, and credential starvation, which lets a compromised agent be cut off from its tools instantly rather than relying on time-boxed access. The conversation touches on why David is sceptical of just-in-time credentialing as a solution for agent security more broadly, since agent sessions don't run on predictable human timescales, along with the current gap between how identity and security vendors are pitching agent protection and what he sees happening at the execution layer in practice. He also discusses the compliance and audit implications of probabilistic decision-making, arguing that regulated industries will increasingly need tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trails that can withstand scrutiny from auditors and regulators who are only beginning to understand agentic risk, and reflects on a named frontier lab's own published framework as an example of the gap between research and practitioner reality. Elsewhere, David reflects candidly on building a bootstrapped security company in an increasingly crowded market, why he turned down aggressive VC funding to stay in control of the product, and what a credible third-party assessment of his own gateway would need to look like given that Assury sits directly in the execution path for every customer's agents.
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