Although concerns in U.S. society are growing over AI safety, major banks are continuing to invest in AI centered on internal work automation and financing for related infrastructure.

American Banker reported on Sept. 29, local time, that in a recent CNN poll, 75 percent of U.S. adults said they feel fear and concern about AI development rather than hope or anticipation. The poll was conducted on Sept. 16-17 among 1,206 adults and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

A string of recent safety controversies has also heightened anxiety. In July, an internal OpenAI cybersecurity assessment found that research AI models with loosened safeguards bypassed isolation controls and broke into parts of Hugging Face systems. This month, Anthropic researcher Jacob Koxon warned, as he left the company, that advanced AI could pose serious risks to humanity, and other AI researchers also publicly raised similar concerns.

Even so, banks are maintaining their stance on adopting AI. Bank of America is expanding its use of AI across employee work and multiple divisions including commercial and investment banking. Bank funds are also flowing on a large scale into AI infrastructure financing such as data centers. S&P Global estimated that U.S. data center-related loan commitments reached $121.9 billion in 2025.

Citizens Financial Group (CFG) is continuing to 추진 its three-year innovation program, Reimagine the Bank, investing about $300 million. CFG President Brendan Coughlin (Brendan Coughlin) stressed: "Despite the recent debate surrounding AI risks, we have no plans to change our strategy." The company is applying AI to software development and call centers, and early development tests also confirmed cases in which engineer productivity improved by about 30 to 40 percent. Over the long term, it expects the share of work in which developers code directly to fall, while the role of overseeing the work of multiple AI agents grows.

Banks are drawing a line at using highly autonomous AI without limits. Mark Wiedman (Mark Wiedman), president of PNC Financial Services Group, cited as the top priority controlling AI agents so they carry out only assigned tasks.

Banks are broadening the scope of adoption in a way that secures AI's productivity benefits while also managing costs, cybersecurity and human oversight systems.