BoE’s Breeden: Little Time Left to Stop AI-Triggered Market Crash

Breeden's warning matters less as a forecast than as an admission: a major central bank is treating autonomous AI agents as a systemic risk it cannot yet contain. The proposed kill switches are conceptually appealing but operationally undefined, which is the real story — regulators are naming the threat before they have the tooling. That gap affects market infrastructure operators and firms deploying AI in execution, not just supervisors. The open question is whether kill-switch testing matures into a workable standard, or whether the industry is left self-policing a risk that crosses firm boundaries.