Britain should review whether general-purpose artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini require dedicated regulation as they play an increasingly important role in consumer financial decision-making, a senior Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) official has said.
FCA Executive Director Sheldon Mills said the regulator’s existing rulebook will need to evolve as financial institutions become increasingly dependent on a small number of major AI and technology providers, creating potential risks for the wider financial system.
The review comes as regulators around the world assess the growing impact of artificial intelligence on financial services, including cybersecurity threats, operational risks associated with frontier AI models and the emergence of autonomous AI agents capable of acting with limited human oversight.
Mills highlighted the increasing use of general-purpose large language models by consumers, with the FCA’s research showing that more than one in four UK consumers trust AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini for financial guidance.
The review also found that many consumers are unaware that the regulatory protections available for authorised financial advice do not extend to recommendations generated by general-purpose AI chatbots.
In addition, the FCA warned that widespread adoption of AI across the financial sector could leave firms overly reliant on a small number of technology providers for critical operational services.
The regulator said that dependence on the same AI models, cloud platforms and underlying technology infrastructure could create common points of failure, increase correlated behaviour across financial institutions and pose broader systemic risks to the UK’s financial system.
