The AI Rulebook Banks Need, with Dara Tarkowski, Esq. from Much Shelist

And before we hit the record button, you know, one of the things we joked about is, you know, when it comes to AI, whether it's agentic or generative or anything in between, why are people so stressed out and why are you so in demand and probably so darn busy these days?

Well, 2026, we'll just focus on 2026 here for a second.

It's been a little bit of a stressful year on a multitude of fronts.

So while I can't attribute everybody's stress directly to artificial intelligence, it's not helping anything.

I can tell you that.

If we just sort of back up and take a look at what's happened so far this calendar year.

on the AI front, you start putting together a timeline, it definitely starts, you know, becoming a little bit concerning.

So rewind February of 2026, we saw a cluster of employment departures across OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, Anthropic Safety Researcher, Murank Sharna, Sharma, rather, left with a resignation letter, essentially warning everyone that the world is in peril.

You know, she was citing AI bioweapons concerns.

And An open AI researcher resigned the same week over a decision not to put advertising into a chatbot.

12 months of precedent, open AI has lost its only dedicated ethicist, its safety systems lead, its former mission alignment head.

About 1300 employees total across AI companies also recently signed an open letter in just July of this past year, calling on the US government to help pace the frontier.

of automated AI development, a lofty goal for those 1,300 employees.

But if they're looking for the U.S. to lead the way, they shouldn't hold their breath.

We can talk about more of that later.

And then OpenAI chief scientist Jacob Pachocki warned this month, actually, that the AI capabilities are outrunning researchers' abilities to monitor them.

I would love to be able to tell the FDIC that one of our, you know, Banks CCOs didn't have enough capacity to monitor a system that it was running.

Somehow those excuses don't fly in the financial services sector.

And then legislatively, we were already seeing Senator Sanders and Representative Greg Kassar introduced a ban Artificial Intelligence Act in September.

That's hot off the presses.

We should just ban it all until we can put our arms around it.

And that piece of proposed legislation was aimed at a very, very narrow, defined class of systems.

But that's just been the past few months.

And it's a lot.

And it's a lot because a lot of development has been happening, which is good and exciting.