Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey warns against weakening AI regulation

The governor of the Bank of England has a message for the deregulation crowd: you’re oversimplifying things. Andrew Bailey has repeatedly pushed back against calls to loosen oversight of artificial intelligence in finance, arguing that the technology’s rapid advancement demands stronger safeguards, not weaker ones. Bailey’s position centers on a straightforward premise. Frontier AI models are getting powerful enough to pose genuine cyber threats to the financial system, and the current testing infrastructure isn’t keeping pace. The case for more testing, not less regulation At a Mansion House speech on July 14, Bailey called advocacy for less regulation “unhelpfully reductive.” His argument isn’t that AI should be slowed down. It’s that the financial system needs rigorous pre-deployment and post-deployment testing protocols before these models are trusted with anything resembling systemic responsibility. Bailey followed up with a letter to G20 finance ministers on August 31, where he described frontier AI’s increasingly sophisticated threat capabilities as a “most immediate concern” for cyber risks to financial systems globally. Then on September 30, he urged authorities to “get a ...