TL;DR

Jamie Dimon has been personally telephoning chief executives to build out an industry body focused on AI risk, according to Reuters sources. The vehicle is the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, which JPMorgan helped establish alongside Mastercard and Berkshire Hathaway Energy, now being repointed at AI. More than 40 companies have been approached since July, and the aim is to have it running by the end of the year.

The approach list runs well beyond banking: energy, water, utilities, telecoms, airlines and railways. Recent attacks on water systems in Minnesota and elsewhere have sharpened the case for sharing information between sectors rather than within them.

Dimon has been among the more outspoken chief executives on frontier AI risk, saying in July that giving individuals access to Anthropic’s Mythos was equivalent to handing out ballistic missiles. He plays down his own part in the alliance: “I am like a support cast member.” Executive chairman Tom Fanning set the body up some time ago, Dimon told CNBC, and this is a change of focus rather than a new organisation. The alliance already covers cyber, physical and geopolitical threats; AI is being layered onto that remit, and the effort to test Anthropic’s Mythos that banks are running separately is not part of it.

A private answer to a public question

The stated intention is to agree a shared picture of how AI is being used, what it threatens and what safeguards are needed, then take that to the Trump administration — advice flowing in both directions. It sits alongside the government’s Gold Eagle initiative, launched in July to pool vulnerability findings between labs, infrastructure operators and federal agencies.

Looking forward

The contrast with Britain is the useful part. Where Andrew Bailey has told UK banks to prove their AI resilience through testing, as covered here on 5 August, the American response is a voluntary club of firms deciding among themselves what good looks like. Both are attempts to fill the same gap. UK financial institutions with US operations may end up inside both regimes, and the standards they set will not necessarily agree.