Report: RBC CEO Weighs Blocking Meta's Muse as Banks Close Ranks
CryptoBriefing says the Canadian bank's chief executive is considering barring outside AI agents from customer accounts, joining JPMorgan and Charles Schwab.…
By Icarus3 min read
CryptoBriefing reported Tuesday that the chief executive of RBC is considering blocking Meta’s Muse from the bank’s systems, which would make the Canadian lender the latest major financial institution to refuse to let outside AI agents operate on customer accounts.
RBC has made no public announcement, and CryptoBriefing cites no statement, event, or named executive behind the claim. Nothing is final, and the report remains unconfirmed by any second source. What is confirmed is the trend it describes: a fast-forming consensus among the biggest banks that an outside AI agent can look at your money but cannot touch it.
The Blockade, So Far
The pushback started with retail. Amazon blocked Muse from its platform in September, citing policy violations tied to unauthorized access, credential handling, and data scraping.
Then the banks drew their own lines. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said on the bank’s third-quarter earnings call on October 13 that the bank prohibits outside AI agents from operating inside customer accounts, calling them “just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan” and warning customers who use them may be taking the liability on themselves.
Three days later, Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster told Bloomberg TV that his firm blocks major outside agents, including Muse, from moving client money, and that it sees tens of such attempts per major agent every week. “We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, something could go wrong and who’s liable?” Wurster said. Schwab will let agents check balances and pull research through its own authenticated channels, but anything that moves money stays off limits.
Why Banks Keep Saying No
The liability question is the thread running through every refusal. When a customer moves money, responsibility is clear. When an agent moves it on the customer’s behalf and something goes wrong, neither the bank nor the customer clearly owns the outcome. No regulator has yet settled the rules.
Credential handling adds a second layer. Amazon’s block specifically flagged how Muse managed login information, and for banks, credential security sits close to the core of the franchise. JPMorgan still allows read-only data sharing through open-banking connectors that customers authorize, and Schwab plans authenticated balance-check access through its own Model Context Protocol servers. The industry’s position amounts to a compromise: look, don’t touch.
What It Means for Muse
The friction exposes the gap between consumer enthusiasm for Muse and institutional permission. Muse still connects to financial accounts through Plaid, but only in read-only form. It can see balances and transactions, not move funds. If banks and retailers keep their gates closed, the agent’s most valuable use cases narrow, and the case for a $100-a-month Maximum subscription weakens.
Meta is working on a longer-term answer. According to a Coinotag report on the JPMorgan block, Meta is developing Poppy, a personal-agent protocol with Sierra, that would identify agent traffic to businesses as agent traffic. The design assumes banks and retailers will accept identified agents rather than block them outright. Until those rules are written, the default answer from the industry’s biggest names is no.
What happens next is concrete: whether RBC formalizes a block, whether other Canadian banks follow, and whether the ongoing discussions between banks and regulators produce a clear answer on who bears the risk when an agent acts. Clear rules could eventually unlock transactional access or cement the current lockout for years.
Source: CryptoBriefing
