AI NewsBank of America kindly asks that you don’t share your banking password with your AI assistant

Bank of America kindly asks that you don’t share your banking password with your AI assistant

3:54 AM IST · October 28, 2026

Financial giant Bank of America is reminding customers to bank safely by kindlynotsharing your banking credentials with your AI agent. In an email blast to customers titled “Protecting your finances in the Al World,” Bank of America urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service, “including an Al-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf.” You can practicallysensethe frustration in the person sending the email. Still, customers are increasingly handing over their log-ins as personal AI assistantsgrow more popular. Sharing your banking username and password with an AI assistant runs the risk that it could do something with your finances without your knowledge, or that your bank thinks someone’s raiding your account and locks you out of it. Worse, a security flaw in the AI assistant could result in it leaking your banking credentials elsewhere, giving financially motivated hackers a way into your bank account. This latest warning comes as banks are still exploring how AI agents fit into the financial world but are reportedly grappling withunauthorized agents accessing their customers’ money. As wediscussed onstageatTechCrunch Disrupt, banks, payment providers, and processors are still trying to figure out how to allow customers access to their bank accounts using AI tools, such as for agentic payments, which allow people to set agents to autonomously buy things at the best price or the right time. Bank of America did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the email. But heed the bank’s warning, for if things go wrong, it’s on you. Account agreements at most banks holdcustomers responsiblefor anyone they give their log-in to. “If you do share your credentials,” its email reads, “keep in mind that you’re responsible for activity resulting from that access.” (viaBryan Toporek)

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Disruptive raises $10B fund to make big bets on at least 10 companies

The Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive, whose past bets include Palantir, Airbnb, and Spotify, announced a $10 billion fund to back at least 10 late-stage companies, with checks of up to $1 billion,it said Tuesday. It’s one of the biggest fundraises of the year so far, aiming to back (what else?!) the capital-intensive fields of AI and defense. The Wall Street Journal first reported earlier this month thatthe firm was seeking to raisethe fund and by then had already secured at least $7.5 billion in capital commitments. The firm was founded in 2012 by Alex Davis, grandson of billionaire oil magnate Marvin Davis. This is technically the firm’s first blind-pool fund, meaning investors commit money without knowing which companies it will back. Until now, the firm raised moneythrough deal-by-deal special purpose vehicles. Disruptive has nonetheless made headlines in recent years for pouring money into companies like chip startup Groq and the AI voice-generation startup ElevenLabs. Bloomberg reportedthat the firm told LPsit has returned more than $6 billion on the roughly $1.9 billion it has put into startups. According to the Dallas Business Journal, the new vehicle is thelargest venture fundraised in Texas history.

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Who’s really in charge at Anthropic after the IPO?

Anthropic was founded in 2021 to ensure humanity can control AI and benefit from it in the long-term. As the frontier lab approaches its initial public offering, however, there’s one class of humanity that is being shut out of control: anyone who buys its stock on public markets. Complex structures that allow founders like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to control their public companies without owning most of them are nothing new in Silicon Valley. But Anthropic’s obsession with AI safety has resulted in a truly baroque style of corporate governance that will leave common shareholders with little say over most major decisions at the AI company, including who sits on its board. First, Anthropic is a public benefit company — a for-profit corporation legally allowed to weigh a public mission alongside profit — with the goal of promoting AI safety. That status protects the board’s ability to make decisions about AI safety that aren’t driven entirely by shareholder value without being sued by angry investors. Right now, the board is chaired by Anthropic president Daniela Amodei and includes CEO Dario Amodei (her brother), Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings, former Microsoft and GM CFO Christopher Liddell, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan, and Spark Capital partner Yasmin Razavi. There is one vacancy on the board. Second, Anthropic has allocated significant control of its board to a Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT), an independent panel meant to keep the company focused on mission to benefit humanity. The trust owns a class of stock that gives it the ability to elect and remove a majority of the company’s board, known as Class T directors. The LTBT is chaired by Neil Shah, a global health expert who was managing director at GiveWell, a nonprofit that ranks charities, and includes former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, national security expert Richard Fontaine, and Harvard physicist Christopher Stubbs. There is one vacancy on the LTBT right now. The existing members will themselves choose who fills it. Third, Anthropic’s seven founders also jointly own a special class of stock that gives a majority of them 50.1% of shareholder voting power, allowing them to elect three members of the board of directors. If, for whatever reason, there’s no majority among the founders, only then are their shares voted in proportion with holders of common stock. Finally, the board can put a check on the LTBT. When the LTBT nominates a “Specified” one of its four directors, or removes that director without cause (that is, without alleging misconduct), the board’s nominating committee can decline to approve the move and throw the decision to the company’s employees for a vote. Here’s what all that looks like: The dynamics of such a complex structure are hard to predict. We’ve already seen one notable instance where a similar structure was essentially overthrown: OpenAI’s so-called blip, when OpenAI’s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman over concerns that he wasnot being candidwith them. Thanks to the loyalty of the company’s employees to Altman, the board backed down, reinstated him, and a new governance structure was put in place. Anthropic’s structure seems to formalize that kind of employee power. At Anthropic, cracks in the founders’ unified front could lead to common shareholders having more say than expected, while employees can overrule the LTBT on board seats if they back the board over the assembled luminaries. The founders’ control won’t last forever: Ten years after the IPO, the founders can choose to end their control of the company, or their control will end automatically when fewer than three of them remain. At that point, the LTBT will continue until 85% of common shareholders vote to end it, or it decides to step down with approval from the board. If and when neither special class of shareholder exists any more — hopefully not because of an AI-driven catastrophe — common shareholders finally get control.

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