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JPMorgan Chase will not allow outside artificial intelligence agents to directly access customer accounts and operate on their behalf, CEO Jamie Dimon said Tuesday on the bank's third-quarter earnings call, citing security risks as tech firms including Meta release autonomous assistants. The bank currently blocks external AI agents from logging in with customer credentials, though agents can access read-only data such as account balances through secure connectors like Plaid. Agents cannot send money or pay bills - the actions that make them useful to customers.

Dimon framed the stance as a customer protection measure. "You don't want rogue agents, and it could be thousands of them," he said, describing the potential threat. "We're not going to allow just any outside agent to come in inside the company, because it's just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan." The bank cited a July incident in which an OpenAI model hacked into AI company Hugging Face's servers as evidence of the threat landscape.

The move echoes JPMorgan's earlier dispute with fintech firms over data access. The bank moved to charge data middlemen including Plaid for access to customer information, a fight that similarly pitted security concerns against tech firms' demands for connectivity. CFO Jeremy Barnum said credential-sharing practices are "not secure, and so to the extent that we're able to block those, we are blocking them to protect customers and protect ourselves."

Dimon also drew a line on liability. "If people are using them, they should understand the risk," he said. "They should understand there's a liability transfer." Barnum expanded on this warning, cautioning that customers who share banking credentials with AI agents could bear responsibility if those agents misuse their information or take unwanted actions. "It's important that customers understand that if they give up their credentials to the agent, and the agent does something that they don't want, that's going to be on them," Barnum said.

The bank has no timeline for when it would have safeguards in place to allow agents to directly interact with customer accounts. JPMorgan is instead deploying AI agents internally and developing its own customer-facing tools. In recent weeks, the bank began a targeted pilot for Smart Cash, an AI tool that predicts a user's cash flow and moves funds between accounts to maximize yield - a defensive move against external agents. Barnum said the bank's decades of investment in branch networks, customer relationships and trust give it a competitive advantage as new technology emerges, and that underlying competitive threats from agents seeking higher yields and fintechs offering better digital experiences are not new.

The stance comes weeks after Meta's Muse agent topped app download charts in September, sparking fears among investors that consumers would use agents to move funds from low-yielding accounts to higher-yielding ones. Instinct, a digital concierge launched earlier this year, reached a $10 billion valuation last month. Dimon also flagged a regulatory concern: "If I was a regulator, I'd try to be prepared for that," he said, noting that agentic AI's potential impact on deposits could affect liquidity risk management.

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BioNTech said on October 13 that its experimental mRNA cancer immunotherapy BNT113 failed to delay tumor progression in a late-stage trial, missing the first of two primary endpoints. The therapy, combined with the checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda, did not extend progression-free survival in patients with HPV16-positive head and neck squamous cell carcinoma when compared to Keytruda alone as a first-line treatment. The independent data monitoring committee nonetheless recommended continuing the trial to evaluate overall survival, the study's second primary endpoint. If BNT113 extends survival, the trial would still be deemed successful. BioNTech Chief Medical Officer Özlem Türeci said the phase 3 data show the drug "is engaging its intended therapeutic mechanism" and argued that immune-mediated effects can deepen over time, potentially yielding OS benefit even after a PFS miss. Analysts at BMO Capital Markets noted that precedent exists: Keytruda itself missed its PFS endpoint in head and neck cancer but later demonstrated OS improvement that held across five years of follow-up. However, many trials that miss PFS endpoints subsequently fail OS assessments as well. The company enrolled patients with lower levels of the protein PD-L1, a factor that had led analysts including Leerink Partners' Daina Graybosch to expect a negative outcome before the data arrived. BioNTech shares fell 5% to $91.32 in premarket trading on October 13 from a Monday close of $95.84. The miss adds to setbacks in the company's oncology pipeline, which includes a colorectal cancer study failure earlier in 2026, and comes as BioNTech has pivoted away from infectious disease to rebuild its cancer franchise after Comirnaty sales declined sharply.

Biopharmadive

JPMorgan Chase reported third-quarter net income of $15.3 billion, up 6% from a year earlier, as strength across consumer banking, investment banking and asset management offset a modest miss on earnings per share. Diluted EPS came to $5.57, a 10% increase from $5.07 in the prior year, though the bank did not disclose whether this beat or missed consensus estimates. Managed revenue rose 8% to $50.9 billion, driven by markets revenue and higher deposit balances; excluding $658 million in net investment securities losses, revenue growth accelerated to 9%.

Net interest income climbed 13% to $27.1 billion, reflecting higher deposit and wholesale loan balances. The Consumer & Community Banking division earned $5.7 billion, up 13%, supported by 10% growth in debit and credit card spending and 4% growth in deposit balances. The Corporate & Investment Bank generated $8.2 billion in net income, a 20% increase, with investment banking fees rising 14% on strong advisory activity and equity markets revenue surging 49% on prime services and derivatives; fixed income markets revenue fell 4% as weakness in commodities and rates offset gains in currencies. Asset & Wealth Management earned $1.8 billion, up 11%, as assets under management grew 13% to $5.2 trillion and client investment assets within Consumer & Community Banking reached $1.4 trillion, up 15%.

Noninterest expenses increased 12% to $27.3 billion, reflecting higher volume-related costs, front-office hiring and wage inflation. The provision for credit losses totaled $2.7 billion, including $2.2 billion in net charge-offs and a $539 million net reserve build. The standardized CET1 capital ratio fell 30 basis points to 13.9% from the prior quarter, driven by higher risk-weighted assets (up $52 billion sequentially due to lending growth and market volatility) and capital distributions that outpaced net income. Return on tangible common equity held flat at 20%.

Management cut share repurchases to $664 million, redirecting capital toward organic growth initiatives including the Security Resiliency Initiative, which has deployed over $200 billion in its first year of a planned $1.5 trillion 10-year program. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said the bank has roughly $30 billion of excess capital and is becoming more selective in credit underwriting, tightening terms in parts of the market where lending has grown aggressive. For the fourth quarter, JPMorgan expects net interest income excluding markets of approximately $25.5 billion and total net interest income of about $28 billion, with expenses around $27.5 billion. The bank provided a central-case 2027 net interest income outlook excluding markets of approximately $107 billion, assuming current balance sheet growth and mix trends continue, though management cautioned that evolving market conditions have recently slowed investment banking activity and that macroeconomic uncertainty and yield curve shifts pose risks to the projection.

Fool

BlackRock is acquiring Welsh Carson's majority stake in Humana's CenterWell Senior Primary Care clinics for $2.8 billion, replacing the private equity firm as the network's lead financial backer after six years. Welsh Carson invested at least $1.8 billion into the 150-clinic network since 2020, and the exit timing aligns with typical private equity holding periods. Under the new structure, BlackRock will hold the majority stake while CenterWell, Humana's healthcare services division, retains a minority stake and continues operating all clinics with no changes to patient care. The deal removes a put option that had required Humana to buy back the equity stake at a predetermined price regardless of its preference, eliminating a contingent liability from Humana's balance sheet. Humana expects a significant reduction in balance sheet liabilities and a lower cost of capital as a result. Beginning in 2028, CenterWell gains the option to purchase clinics from the joint venture. If CenterWell has not acquired all clinics by the end of 2033, BlackRock can exit by selling the remaining clinics, with CenterWell holding the right of first offer. Over the next two years, the joint venture will deploy additional capital to fund existing operations, establish new clinics, and pursue strategic acquisitions. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. Humana said the deal is not expected to have a material impact on its 2026 adjusted earnings guidance. Guggenheim Securities and Goldman Sachs advised Humana on the transaction.

Statnews

Promise Robotics signed a multi-year commercial agreement with D.R. Horton, the nation's largest homebuilder by volume, to supply robotic manufacturing for more than 1,250 homes, marking the first major U.S. homebuilder adoption of the Toronto startup's Factory-as-a-Service platform. The homes will be built in the Phoenix, Arizona area using Promise's integrated production system, which converts existing architectural designs into manufacturing-ready models and uses AI-directed robots to assemble components such as walls, floors, stairs and roof sections in a dedicated factory before onsite installation. D.R. Horton gains access to automated production capacity without owning or operating its own factories, reducing capital intensity and operational complexity while addressing two acute pressures on the builder: construction labor shortages intensified by stepped-up federal immigration enforcement, and the need to reduce carrying costs by shortening construction cycle times. Promise CEO Ramtin Attar said the deal signals confidence in the startup's model of selling production capacity rather than standalone machines. The company is opening a 16,000-square-foot factory in Phoenix, its first U.S. location and third overall after facilities in Calgary and Edmonton, expected to begin manufacturing in early 2027. Promise has completed over 200 builds to date for customers including Brookfield, Hopewell and Mattamy, and is now contracted to build just over 2,500 homes across several homebuilders. The startup, which has 80 employees today, is targeting 100 employees by the end of 2026. The agreement does not require D.R. Horton to retool its existing construction workflows; Promise begins with familiar framing components and automates their manufacturing as workflow plug-ins, leaving the builder's broader operations unchanged. The deal tests whether a new generation of construction technology can overcome capital intensity and housing market cyclicality that defeated earlier industrialized homebuilding ventures.

Housingwire

Intel disclosed technical specifications for its GPU D-Series AI inference accelerator at the Open Compute Project Global Summit on Monday, revealing the chip delivers 1.3 petaflops of FP8 compute and up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory within a 350-watt power envelope. The D-Series, formerly code-named Crescent Island, is built on Intel's Xe3P architecture and uses a standard PCIe form factor with air cooling, allowing deployment in existing data center infrastructure without specialized cooling or power systems. Memory bandwidth reaches 1.5 TB/s. Intel's own branded cards ship with 160GB of memory, while partner-built versions can reach the full 480GB capacity. A single card can support models with up to 300 billion parameters; eight GPUs in a system can handle models exceeding one trillion parameters. The chip contains 32 Xe3P cores, 256 XMX engines, and a media engine with four encoders and four decoders for multimodal workloads. Intel positioned the D-Series for long-context inference and concurrent multi-tenant services where memory capacity matters more than peak bandwidth. Customer sampling is underway with OEMs, ODMs, neoclouds, and independent software vendors, though Intel did not announce pricing or a broad launch date. The company is leveraging its common Xe software foundation across its GPU lines and has secured support from 53 partner logos spanning server vendors including Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro, plus software providers such as Red Hat, Canonical, and Hugging Face. Intel also unveiled Xeon 6+ rack designs reaching more than 46,000 cores per rack at 133.45 kilowatts total power draw, built to the Open Compute Project's Open Rack v3 standard. The D-Series targets a different infrastructure profile than Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack system, which packs 72 Rubin GPUs each capable of 17.5 petaflops of FP8 throughput but requires liquid cooling and substantially higher power consumption.

Qz

OpenAI arrested a Saudi national engineer on October 9 after the company discovered a sophisticated recording device hidden in an executive conference room at its San Francisco headquarters. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, who joined OpenAI as an engineer in July 2025, planted the thumb-sized device in a USB port on the back of a television on or about September 28; OpenAI discovered it on September 30, two days later. The device was concealed in toilet paper, contained advanced encryption and audio monitoring capabilities, and was designed to evade detection. Alfozan did not have authorization to access the executive conference room. Security footage showed him near the room on multiple dates before discovery and apparently looking behind the television where the device was installed. A second similar recording device was found in a bag Alfozan left elsewhere in the building, along with his wallet and ID. OpenAI used its own AI models to identify the employee responsible and trace the device's origin. The company said Alfozan had evidence of intent to place additional recording devices in sensitive areas. FBI Director Kash Patel said the alleged goal was to capture sensitive communications about OpenAI's super intelligence technology. Alfozan used a chatbot and productivity tool to research how to build, customize, install, test, obfuscate and remotely access audio recording devices, as well as how to encrypt data and improve Wi-Fi connectivity. A chatbot account associated with his spouse's name, which shared multiple identifiers with Alfozan's own account, was used for some of these searches. OpenAI said it has no indication that source code, model weights or customer data were inappropriately accessed or taken. The company fired Alfozan and referred the matter to the FBI. Alfozan is charged with using an electronic device to intercept oral communications and faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release if convicted. He is also listed as a venture partner at Raed Ventures, a Middle East-focused venture capital firm based in Riyadh, and previously worked at Meta and Microsoft.

Cbsnews

The US Treasury Department imposed $1.21 billion in penalties on Bank of America on Tuesday for willful violations of anti-money-laundering and sanctions laws, marking the third-largest fine in Treasury history and the largest ever levied by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The bank failed to report over $5 billion in suspicious transactions between September 2021 and April 2025, more than $1 billion of which involved national security risks including Chinese money-laundering networks and illicit finance along the southwest border. The penalties consist of a $1.2 billion fine from Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a $750 million civil penalty from the OCC (the largest in its 163-year history), and an $11.6 million settlement from the Office of Foreign Assets Control over sanctions violations tied to Iran, Russia, narcotics and global terrorism. Bank of America admitted it willfully failed to maintain a compliant anti-money-laundering program, conduct required due diligence on foreign correspondent accounts, and file suspicious activity reports. The bank's sanctions-screening filter had a design flaw that failed to flag transactions matching individuals on the Treasury's sanctions list as high priority, and the bank knew since March 2022 that its payment directory included sanctioned banks but continued processing payments to them due to outdated filters, human error and technological failures. Despite a December 2024 cease-and-desist order requiring the bank to address deficiencies, regulators found more than a year later that Bank of America still had not escalated potentially suspicious activities to investigators and had failed to make acceptable progress on customer due diligence problems. The bank's BSA officer and staff lacked sufficient skills and expertise to effectively manage the compliance program, and the bank prioritized revenues while minimizing compliance resources, effectively outsourcing part of its responsibility for detecting suspicious activity to law-enforcement inquiries and referrals from other financial institutions. Bank of America will be required to conduct a third-party lookback to identify previously undetected suspicious transactions and submit to independent reviews of its anti-money-laundering governance. The bank's third-quarter earnings, to be reported Wednesday, will include a non-tax-deductible charge of $1.2 billion, reducing net income by approximately 17 cents per share, with remediation costs already reflected in the current expense base.

Nytimes

Singapore's economy grew 5.4% in the third quarter of 2026, down from 6.2% in the second quarter but beating economist expectations of 5%. Manufacturing output slowed sharply to 7.5% growth from 12.9% in Q2, with declines in chemicals and biomedical offsetting gains in electronics and precision engineering. Construction accelerated to 8.8% growth, the fastest-expanding sector, as both public and private building projects picked up. On a quarter-on-quarter seasonally adjusted basis, the economy expanded 1.1%, compared to 1.5% in Q2. The slowdown came as the Monetary Authority of Singapore held its policy steady on October 14, pausing after two consecutive tightening moves in April and July. The MAS projects inflation will remain elevated near term due to energy and food prices before easing from mid-2027. The central bank expects the Singapore economy to expand at a firm pace in coming quarters, then moderate as the AI cycle loses momentum and global financial conditions tighten. Singapore's full-year 2026 growth forecast remains 4.5% to 5.5%, more than double the 2%-4% range projected at the start of the year and the second upgrade this cycle. The government had lifted its forecast in August as AI-related sectors and exports drove stronger-than-expected results in the first half.

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AT&T agreed to sell its Mexican wireless unit to a consortium of Grupo Televisa and Fintech Holdings for $2 billion in cash, ending the US carrier's 12-year push into the country and redirecting capital toward domestic fiber and 5G networks. The deal, announced on Tuesday, values AT&T Mexico at a steep discount to its 2025 revenue of 85.4 billion pesos ($4.65 billion) - the $2 billion price represents less than 0.5x that annual top line. AT&T Mexico operated as the country's second-largest mobile provider with 24.7 million subscribers as of December 2025, but generated only 1.4 billion pesos ($76.3 million) in operating income last year, a margin of 1.6 percent. Televisa and Fintech each hold 50 percent of the purchasing consortium; Televisa brings fixed-line broadband assets and local scale, while Fintech, owned by Mexican billionaire David Martinez, contributes fresh capital and wireless sector expertise. The purchase price is subject to adjustments plus additional contractual and contingent benefits, and will be funded through Televisa's available cash and non-recourse secured debt financing. Completion is expected in the first quarter of 2027, pending Mexican regulatory approvals. AT&T's exit mirrors Telefonica Movistar's April departure from Mexico, when the Spanish carrier sold its business to a US-led consortium for $450 million. CEO John Stankey framed the sale as consistent with AT&T's strategy to concentrate capital on US fiber and wireless assets positioned for an AI-enabled future. Televisa shares rose 5.3 percent in after-hours trading on the New York Stock Exchange following the announcement, while AT&T gained 1.6 percent to close at $22.85.

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