It is "nearly unavoidable" that AI will trigger a financial crisis within the decade unless regulators step in, says Securities and Exchange Commission head Gary Gensler.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Gensler warns that regulating AI is a "hard challenge" because a host of financial institutions may all be using the same base models. In addition, these models could be developed not by the financial firms themselves but by technology companies that are not regulated by the SEC and other Wall Street watchdogs.
Gensler tells the FT: “It’s a hard financial stability issue to address because most of our regulation is about individual institutions, individual banks, individual money market funds, individual brokers; it’s just in the nature of what we do. And this is about a horizontal [matter whereby] many institutions might be relying on the same underlying base model or underlying data aggregator.”
He continues: "If everybody’s relying on a base model and the base model is sitting not at the broker dealer, but it’s sitting at one of the big tech companies. And how many cloud providers do we have in this country?"
If firm use the same models, there is a risk of herd behaviour, says Gensler: "I do think we will in the future have a financial crisis...in the after action reports people will say ‘Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model...we’ve relied on’."
Gensler says he has discussed the issue with the Financial Stability Board and the Financial Stability Oversight Council, noting that "it’s really a cross-regulatory challenge".