Britain's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) wants AI providers to warn users about the limits of the financial information and advice their models generate. Jessica Rusu, its chief data, information and intelligence officer, made the request today (Monday) at Bloomberg's UK Policy Series.
The FCA is asking for "clear, proportionate and consistent disclaimers" from the companies behind general-purpose models, according to the text of the speech published by the regulator. Rusu said such warnings may work best at the point where AI-generated financial information reaches the user.
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Rusu tied the request to two figures. Four in five less-experienced investors aged 18 to 40 have used AI for help with investing, she said, but only 40% of consumers understand they have no recourse if they act on general-purpose AI advice and it goes wrong.
A Request Without a Rulebook
The speech framed the disclaimers as a call to AI providers and set no deadline. Last week, FCA Chief Executive Nikhil Rathi told lawmakers that a chatbot offering general information, without a personal recommendation that leads to a transaction, is not wholly inside the regulated perimeter.
FinanceMagnates.com reported at the time that the regulator plans to automate its own supervision with AI while holding off on rules for chatbots.
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Rusu also set out the regulator's response to the Mills Review, published in July, on how AI could reshape retail financial services by 2030. She said the FCA is embedding six of its seven recommendations into live work.
Instead of building a new public tool for financial capability, as the review proposed, the FCA will build on the first TechSprint of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), run with its AI Lab. The aim is to help investors spot scams and question unreliable AI answers.
Regulators elsewhere face the same problem at scale. Australia's securities regulator took down more than 19,400 scams in its latest fiscal year as AI deepfakes targeted investors.
Brokers Already Let Agents Into Live Accounts
On agentic finance, the FCA will work with industry, other regulators and frontier labs on a framework covering agent identity, delegated authority, accountability and execution. Rusu gave no timetable for it.
"Agentic systems therefore require continuous, conditional assurance," she said. A system that is safe at launch may behave differently at scale or when the underlying model changes, she added.
Brokers have not waited for that framework. At least 10 retail brokers and platform vendors connected AI agents to live client accounts in the first half of 2026, and Anthropic's Claude was named in nine of those launches, an FM Intelligence study found.
How much authority the agent gets already varies. Interactive Brokers lets Claude draft trades that clients must approve before an order goes out.
At the other end, eToro lets investors delegate trades to AI agents that run inside separate portfolios.
None of the launches in the FM Intelligence study let an agent deposit, withdraw or move client money.
Near-Misses Would Join Incident Reports
Firms already have to report major incidents to the FCA.
Rusu said that duty "must extend to significant AI failures and near-misses."
She described near-miss reporting for agentic AI, meaning systems that act on a user's behalf, as both a regulatory and a national security priority.
The FCA also published good and poor practice on AI today, drawn from its work with firms, including its AI Live Testing program. The guidance creates no new requirements, the regulator said.
It points to a named senior manager for each AI use case and lists dependence on a single model or vendor as an area for improvement.
One case study describes a firm that had to redesign a product after the model behind it was retired.
A joint survey with the Bank of England, due next week, shows 86% of firms now use AI, Rusu said. In the European Union, 87% of the AI use cases securities firms reported to the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) were for internal use, FM Intelligence found.
