In a welcome address to the European Systemic Risk Board’s annual conference, Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank and Chair of the ESRB, urged policymakers to strengthen macroprudential monitoring of artificial intelligence risks across financial markets. She highlighted three interconnected threats: autonomous agents acting contrary to human intentions in trading, AI enabled attacks spreading through shared technology, and geopolitical restrictions disrupting access to frontier models on which European financial institutions may increasingly depend. Generative AI is already used by nearly nine out of 10 significant euro area banks, although agentic AI remains limited. Lagarde warned that wider reliance on a small number of models could cause firms to respond similarly to shocks, amplify price movements and make effective human oversight harder. In cyber resilience, rapidly advancing models could shorten the interval between an initial exploit and widespread automated attacks from weeks to hours, while defenders may remain at a disadvantage in the short to medium term because security fixes require testing before deployment. Lagarde called for reviews and updates of cyber defences around critical financial systems, timely incident response plans and coordination where attacks could spread across the sector. She also argued that Europe should develop its own AI capabilities and participate in the AI supply chain to reduce dependence on externally controlled access, alongside global cooperation to keep frontier AI from bad actors while preserving access for defenders of critical systems.

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