Financial Policy Committee
Bank of England committee responsible for identifying and reducing systemic risk to UK financial stability.
The Financial Policy Committee flagged systemic risk from agentic AI in UK financial markets on 10 April 2026, directing the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority to study payments risk after finding three-quarters of UK financial firms already deploy AI.
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What systemic AI risks did the Bank of England's FPC flag in April 2026?
Timeline for Financial Policy Committee
Published its September record
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The Financial Policy Committee (FPC) is the Bank of England's statutory body for identifying and addressing risks to the stability of the UK financial system. It was given formal statutory powers under the Financial Services Act 2012, meets four times a year, and publishes the Financial Stability Report twice annually.
Its membership includes the Bank's Governor, currently Andrew Bailey, Deputy Governors and external appointees. The Committee's REMIT is macro-prudential: setting capital buffers, controlling leverage and flagging systemic vulnerabilities, rather than supervising individual firms day to day, a task that falls to the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
The Treasury Committee has separately pressed for AI-specific stress tests and clearer FCA guidance by the end of 2026, putting parliamentary pressure behind the FPC's own work on agentic AI risk.
FPC flags agentic AI systemic risk
The Financial Policy Committee's April 2026 record was the first to address AI specifically. It directed the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority to study agentic AI in payments and financial markets, noting that three-quarters of UK financial firms already deploy AI and that systemic risk from agentic deployment is likely to increase rapidly.
The FPC's directive assumed regulatory attention could focus on a single dominant frontier model. Three weeks later, the UK's AI Security Institute confirmed a second model, OpenAI's GPT-5.5, had cleared the same 32-step autonomous attack benchmark that Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview had already passed, a sign the Committee's framing had already been overtaken by the pace of model capability.
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