LockBit ransomware group's leader unmasked and hit with sanctions; UK house prices inch higher– business live

Advances in artificial intelligence risk destabilising the financial markets, a Bank of England policymaker is warning today. Jonathan Hall, an external member of our Financial Policy Committee (FPC), argues that market stability could be threatened if deep neural networks – programs that uses multiple layers of artificial neurons to process information – were turned into deep trading agents, which select and execute trading strategies. Hall tells the University of Exeter Business School that AI traders could amplify shocks and undermine market stability. Hall cites a well-known example of AI confusion, where researches taught a system what a panda looked like, and then added noise to the picture of a panda – leading the AI system to declare that the animal was almost certainly a gibbon. From a financial stability perspective, this raises the question of whether through bad luck, or targeted malicious behaviour, a tiny change in market prices could abruptly shift the trading signal from "buy" to "strong sell"? And, unlike in the image example, it would be extremely difficult for a human to know whether that sudden shift was the result of a model error, or indicated some important, but inscrutable, information in the pattern of prices.