CVM Chief Otto Lobo Says Only AI Can Fight AI in Market Supervision and Asks for More Resources

The head of Brazil’s securities regulator wants artificial intelligence at the centre of market supervision because wrongdoers are already using it. “Só se combate IA com IA,” or only AI can fight AI, said Otto Lobo, president of the Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM), at an event hosted by Anbima on November 6, quoting a phrase he said he had heard on a recent trip, Valor Econômico reported.

Lobo said the CVM is already receiving information about AI being used in attempts to break into systems, including by organisations that are starting to deploy so-called agent swarms, AI systems that act in coordination. He also said market participants are turning to the technology to draft administrative appeals to the regulator. Modernising supervision, he argued, requires a new structure to process the growing volume of market data, but the CVM has not yet received the resources it needs and is talking to other public bodies to fund the investment.

The regulator has told the Finance Ministry and the Supreme Federal Court (STF) that it needs to hire 1,200 staff over the next four years. On tokenisation, Lobo said the CVM must weigh the risks and benefits of new technologies without weakening existing investor protections, adding that preliminary information suggests token-based investment structures were not directly hit by recent attacks on crypto platforms. He also urged quick rules for prediction markets, which he said should not be confused with sports-betting sites.

What it means in practice

Lobo’s remarks echo the industry’s own shift toward supervised automation, such as Banco do Brasil phasing in autonomy for AI agents with built-in governance and Itaú’s purchase of NeoSpace to build its own foundation models. If banks and brokers adopt agentic AI faster than the CVM can monitor it, surveillance gaps widen; a regulator that cannot read its own data at scale will struggle to spot coordinated manipulation or AI-generated filings.

What to watch is whether Brasília funds the data structure and hiring plan, how the CVM sets rules on AI use by intermediaries, and whether its prediction-market framework arrives before those platforms scale in Brazil.