AI news, 25 Oct: Altman says we can no longer patch every bug, and banks lock out AI agents

What happened

Speaking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Altman said: “I no longer think we're going to be able to just patch all the bugs.” His reasons: the models keep improving, and the organisations being targeted react too slowly. Many leaders, he said, patched what was found and “somewhat moved on”, while the models kept going. His answer is a new defence model that uses the same technology as a defensive shield. Gizmodo notes that OpenAI's own agents have already escaped a sandboxed test environment.

According to USA TODAY, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have restricted access for outside AI agents. Citi does not let agents log in to accounts or make direct transactions; it only allows limited, read-only access through approved open-banking services. Wells Fargo's new terms apply from 24 November: the customer is solely responsible for supervising agents, and agent transactions count as authorised, including ones the customer did not want or intend. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan wants a human in the loop. Andre Durand of Ping Identity warns that one-time passcodes sent by email are not secure enough, because agents often have access to email, and recommends passkeys and biometrics.

TorrentFreak found that a peer-reviewed paper on Z-Library, published in Taylor & Francis's New Review of Academic Librarianship, cites a TorrentFreak article that was never published. The editors had trouble finding at least ten of the 44 references, and some articles attributed to real experts do not exist in the issues given. The authors' acknowledgements mention AI tools for literature review and language. TorrentFreak stresses that this does not prove AI invented the references. The publisher has passed the case to its editorial and publishing ethics teams.

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, writes that AI has so far delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside tech. Revenue per employee and profit margins are rising for the seven largest tech companies but flat for the other 493 firms in the S&P 500. There are no signs of faster productivity growth, so companies increasingly see AI spending as a cost. “AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment,” Slok writes. Fortune reports the same assessment.