Le istanze dell’educazione finanziaria di fronte al “vitello d’oro” dei mercati: il ruolo dell’intelligenza artificiale

The growing pervasiveness of artificial intelligence in financial markets is exposing retail investors to unprecedented forms of cognitive and information- al asymmetry, as recently underscored by ESMA’s 2025 Warning on the use of AI-driven tools in investment decisions. The purpose of this article is to investi- gate the regulatory and dogmatic implications of this phenomenon at the inter- section of the EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689), the MiFID framework, and the Italian Consolidated Law on Finance (TUF). The methodology adopted is dogmatic and comparative-regulatory: the notion of “AI system” is reconstruct- ed as an organisational rather than a merely technological entity, and is then test- ed against the allocation of liability along the AI value chain (Article 25 AIA), the conceptual distinction between control and authority underpinning the deployer category, and the emerging paradigm of AIas-a-service in financial intermedia- tion. Particular attention is devoted to fin-influencers and large diffusion models (LDMs) as new vectors of systemic risk, and to the IOSCO 2025 Report’s rec- ommendations on supervisory convergence. The article concludes that, where algorithmic opacity erodes the traditional pillars of investor protection, financial education must be reconceived as a constitutional precondition for the effective exercise of the economic freedoms; the principle of technological neutrality, far from being a passive regulatory stance, is reinterpreted as an active duty to safe- guard the human dimension of financial choice – the actus humanus – against the seductive promises of algorithmic infallibility, which the article evokes through the metaphor of the markets’ “golden calf”.