JPMorgan Chase plans to deploy artificial intelligence agents later this year that can work autonomously for far longer than existing versions, marking another milestone in the corporate adoption of AI, CNBC has learned exclusively.

AI agents are evolving from tools that complete single tasks to digital workers that manage workflows across multiple steps and disparate software programs, Derek Waldron, JPMorgan chief analytics officer, told CNBC in an interview.

“We’ve entered now the era of long-running autonomous agents,” Waldron said. That “means that agents don’t just run for two or three minutes to carry out a goal or some instructions of a human, they can run for an hour or two.”

Long-running agents have already emerged over the past year as examples including Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenClaw went viral. JPMorgan’s planned deployment, however, suggests the technology is close to clearing the security and governance hurdles that have slowed adoption inside large companies.

JPMorgan, run by CEO Jamie Dimon since 2006, is the biggest U.S. bank by assets and has a nearly $20 billion annual technology budget.

While much of the conversation around generative AI has focused on model intelligence, tech leaders are increasingly focused on a different question, said Waldron: How long can AI systems operate effectively before requiring human intervention?

That concept, which Waldron called “intellectual coherence,” has been helped by improvements in how AI models reason, enabling them to be more of a “team manager than an individual worker,” he said.

“Just like how people function, team managers can parse out a problem and delegate activities, and teams can run for a lot longer to do more complex things,” Waldron said.

Other recent advances that have helped agents do more complex jobs include the ability to write code, control web browsers and interact directly with desktop software, he said.

While long-running agents aren’t yet ready for corporate use because of security concerns, their arrival isn’t far off, Waldron said: “We will have those in 2026.”

Eventually, AI agents will remain coherent for “multiple hours, then days, then weeks,” he said.

A JPMorgan Chase-led group of banks cut their exposure to a private credit fund co-managed by KKR days before the asset manager announced it was spending $300 million to prop up the troubled vehicle.

The fund, FS KKR Capital Corp., said Monday in a release that KKR will inject $150 million into the fund as equity and spend another $150 million to buy shares from investors who want to exit.

Those moves, labeled “Strategic Value Enhancement Actions” by the fund, came after the JPMorgan-led group on Friday slashed its credit line by $648 million, or about 14%, to $4.05 billion. Some lenders may have exited entirely rather than extend their commitments, according to the filing.

The fund, co-run by KKR and the alternative asset manager Future Standard and often referred to by its ticker, FSK, has become one of the most visible fault lines in the private credit story. Its shares have plunged by nearly half over the past year and trade at a deep discount to the fund’s net asset value.

In March, Moody’s downgraded FSK’s ratings to junk amid mounting stress in the portfolio. Since then, loans to software maker Medallia and dental services firm Affordable Care have stopped paying interest, FSK executives said Monday.

FSK said it had losses of $2 per share in the first quarter, or about $560 million in total losses given the roughly 280 million share count, as the fund’s net asset value fell about 10%.

“We are disappointed by our recent performance,” FSK President Daniel Pietrzak told analysts Monday.

The firm’s read of the situation and KKR’s actions to prop up the fund “support our view of a disconnect in the trading price of FSK versus its intrinsic value,” Pietrzak added.

FSK loans that are no longer generating income jumped to 8.1% by the end of the first quarter from 5.5% at year-end, the fund said.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is calling for a broad recommitment to American ideals as his bank navigates geopolitical uncertainty, a teetering economy and the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence.

Dimon in his annual letter to shareholders, published Monday, noted the country’s 250th anniversary as “the perfect time to rededicate ourselves to the values that made this great nation of ours — freedom, liberty and opportunity.”

“The challenges we all face are significant. The list is long but at the top are the terrible ongoing war and violence in Ukraine, the current war in Iran and the broader hostilities in the Middle East, terrorist activity and growing geopolitical tensions, importantly with China,” Dimon said. “Even in troubled times, we have confidence that America will do what it has always done — look to the values that have defined our singular nation and sustained our leadership of the free world.”

Dimon, the longtime leader of the world’s largest bank by market cap, is among the most outspoken of U.S. corporate leaders. His annual letter offers not only a matter of record for his firm’s performance, but also sweeping perspectives on the global state of affairs.

In Monday’s letter, Dimon noted headwinds including global conflicts, persistent inflation, private market upheaval and what he called “poor bank regulations.”

Dimon said that while regulations like those put in place after the 2008 financial crisis “accomplished some good things … they also created a fragmented, slow-moving system with expensive, overlapping and excessive rules and regulations — some of which made the financial system weaker and reduced productive lending.”

He specifically cited negative consequences of capital and liquidity requirements, the current construction of the Federal Reserve’s stress test and a “badly handled” process at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Dimon also said JPMorgan’s reaction to revised proposals for Basel 3 Endgame and a global systemically important bank, or GSIB, surcharge — issued by U.S. regulators last month — were “mixed.”

“While it was good to see that the recent proposals for the Basel 3 Endgame (B3E) and GSIB attempted to reduce the increase in required capital from the 2023 proposals, there are still some aspects that are frankly nonsensical,” Dimon said.

The CEO said with the aggregate proposed surcharges of about 5%, the bank would need to hold “as much as 50% more capital across the vast majority of loans to U.S. consumers and businesses when compared with a large non-GSIB bank for the same set of loans.”

“Frankly, it’s not right, and it’s un-American,” he said.

Three years ago, JPMorgan Chase executive Doug Petno was at a New York City party celebrating a colleague’s retirement when his boss, Jamie Dimon, called Petno over.

It was March 9, 2023, and the customers of a West Coast lender known for catering to startups had been withdrawing deposits in droves.

“Jamie looks at me and says, ‘Get on this call,'” Petno told CNBC this week in an exclusive interview.

On the line were regulators with an urgent question: Was JPMorgan interested in buying Silicon Valley Bank?

California’s finance regulators seized SVB the next day, completing the sudden collapse of an institution at the heart of the American startup community. Over that weekend, Dimon, Petno and other JPMorgan leaders repeatedly weighed whether they should purchase the bank, which had just lost $42 billion in deposits. They decided against it, in part because thousands of SVB clients were signing up for JPMorgan accounts, anyway, in a flight to safety.

“We had three years’ worth of incoming clients in a weekend,” said Petno, who is co-head of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment bank. “Onboarding teams were opening up accounts around the clock.”

Emboldened by what they were seeing, Petno had an idea: What if JPMorgan could build a true competitor to SVB — as well as startups Brex, Ramp and Mercury — all of whom had carved a profitable niche serving founders and venture capital investors?

“We went to our board and said, ‘there’s a vacuum in the market,'” Petno told CNBC. “At that very moment, everybody saw the opportunity.”

For JPMorgan, already a giant in Main Street and Wall Street finance, winning the more specific niche of startup banking from West Coast rivals is about more than gaining deposits. It’s both a key element of the growth strategy for a bank with more than $180 billion in revenue last year, and also a means to help the New York-based lender stay close to technology developments for itself.

JPMorgan, with a tech budget of nearly $20 billion this year, is aiming to not only serve startup clients and VC investors better, but to learn from them. The firm keeps a close eye on Silicon Valley startups for solutions to problems the bank itself faces, from cybersecurity to quantum computing.

In fact, when a JPMorgan client announces a round of artificial intelligence-related cutbacks to jobs and expenses, the firm will often send a team of bankers to investigate how the client is doing it, said Petno.

Typically, the bankers find that implementing new AI agents is only a fraction of the reason for layoffs, while other factors like over-hiring and inefficient processes account for the rest, he said.

JPMorgan began its startup banking business in 2016 as it became aware of its tech-focused rivals during its westward expansion. In the beginning, it only served bigger, more mature startups.

That’s in part because the bank didn’t yet have a digital banking solution that younger founders in particular craved, Petno said. It also didn’t have enough investment bankers at the time to target smaller, riskier startups.

For years, the view on JPMorgan from some in the VC community was that it took too long to open an account, or that resolving issues around payments involved dealing with time-consuming visits to a branch, investors told CNBC.

“They want to go to the website to open an account, and if it’s more than 15 minutes, they’re done,” says Petno.

But in the weeks that followed the SVB collapse, Petno and his team moved quickly, hiring a few key players from SVB, including then-SVB Capital President John China, who today leads JPMorgan’s innovation economy business along with Andrew Kresse.  

By late April of 2023, JPMorgan found itself looking at buying another wounded California-based bank. This time, it made the winning bid for First Republic, which also catered to the tech community.

With fresh learnings from SVB and the banking operations of First Republic, JPMorgan doubled its revenue from startup banking in 2023, according to the company.

Despite the digital banking focus, a startup founder will still sometimes walk into a Chase branch to deposit a huge funding check into a regular account. Now, when that happens, JPMorgan’s systems immediately gets that client moved to the startup team, Petno says.

JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America said Wednesday in separate releases that the firms will match the U.S. government’s one-time $1,000 contribution to children’s retirement savings accounts for eligible employees, the latest corporations to announce such a measure.

The so-called Trump accounts are part of a pilot program that deposits $1,000 from the U.S. Treasury into tax-advantaged accounts for eligible children born in the U.S. between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028.

The program, partly the brainchild of hedge fund manager Brad Gerstner, aims to help narrow the U.S. wealth gap by encouraging long-term saving and investing from birth. It has attracted commitments from a growing list of wealthy individuals, from billionaires such as Michael and Susan Dell and Ray Dalio to rap artist Nicki Minaj.

“JPMorgan Chase has demonstrated a long-term commitment to the financial health and well-being of all of our employees and their families around the world, including more than 190,000 here in the United States,” CEO Jamie Dimon said in a release. “By matching this contribution, we’re making it easier for them to start saving early, invest wisely, and plan for their family’s financial future.”

In a memo sent to employees Wednesday first reported by Reuters, Bank of America said it applauded the government’s “innovative solutions” for employee savings.

Financial firms dominate the list of companies that are matching contributions for the new accounts. Besides JPMorgan and Bank of America, the two largest U.S. banks by assets, BlackRock, BNY, Robinhood, SoFi and Charles Schwab have made similar announcements.

President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened to sue JPMorgan Chase over allegedly “debanking” him following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“I’ll be suing JPMorgan Chase over the next two weeks for incorrectly and inappropriately DEBANKING me after the January 6th Protest, a protest that turned out to be correct for those doing the protesting,” Trump said in a social media post. “The Election was RIGGED!”

JPMorgan and the White House didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

In August, Trump signed an executive order requiring banks to ensure they are not refusing financial services to clients based on religious or political beliefs, a practice known as “debanking.”

Trump claimed in a CNBC interview in August, without providing evidence, that he was personally discriminated against by banks. He said JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America refused to take his deposits following his first term in office.

At the time, JPMorgan said it does not close accounts for political reasons, while Bank of America said it doesn’t comment on client matters. BofA also said it would welcome clearer rules from regulators on how to conduct its activities.

Trump and his family have a history of railing against financial institutions for allegedly refusing to work with them on the basis of their political orientation.

Last year, Donald Trump Jr. said his family had difficulty accessing big bank services — a situation that allegedly prompted the Trumps to enter the cryptocurrency industry.

“So, [my family] got into crypto, not because it was like, ‘hey, this is the next cool thing,’ we got into it out of necessity,” Trump Jr. told CNBC in an interview last June.

JPMorgan shares are down about 5% over the past week, even after the bank on Tuesday topped expectations for its fourth-quarter earnings and revenue.

Trump’s legal threat against JPMorgan comes as the president, in the same Truth Social post, denied a Journal report on Wednesday that said the president had offered JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the position of Federal Reserve chairman months ago during a meeting at the White House.

Dimon took the proposition as a joke, according to the Journal report.

In his post, Trump denied the report, underscoring his reservations about Dimon and JPMorgan.

“This statement is totally untrue, there was never such an offer,” he wrote. “Why wouldn’t The Wall Street Journal call me to ask whether or not such an offer was made? I would have very quickly told them, “NO,” and that would have been the end of the story.”

The Journal and JPMorgan did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside of normal business hours.

Current Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s term ends on May 15.