A transaction of some sort ...

Milkweed bug

AI agents, your brand new digital friend, never tires in helping you out from making recommendations on the color of socks you should buy to planning out a holiday trip, complete with booking air plane flights and selecting the right hotel accommodations, now extends to running your bank account.
What could possibly go wrong?

When looking at the little guy above, it reminds yours truly of an AI agent connecting to your bank just as the insect pays a visit to the milkweed plant. The scale and purpose may be different but the intent is the same. A transaction of some sort will be made between the plant and the insect just as a transaction will be made between the bank and the AI agent.

Doomsaying about the coming AI apocalypse is no longer relegated to outbursts
from a few tech billionaires.

Now, the major American banks whose policies dictate the flow of capital throughout the world are starting to worry about rogue AI, preparing contingency plans for the “day after” a theoretical AI-driven catastrophe.

That’s according to new reporting from Axios, which notes that banks are preparing for the worst as they experience a huge rise in AI agent activity on behalf of individual customers.

The main worry seems to be an influx of financial activity driven by autonomous AI agents, which have been authorized to access bank accounts by their human users. In some cases, as Axios noted previously, those agents are making moves that haven’t explicitly been prompted by humans — a few even going so far as to contact call centers on behalf of their users, without being instructed to do so.

That’s become a major liability for top banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo, which are scrambling to implement security procedures and policy updates to get ahead of the AI swarm.

Convergence 5

Failing to stay on top of emerging risks, some experts say, could result in financial catastrophe. As chief economist at the Apollo wealth management firm Torsten Slok explained in a late September brief, AI agents operating under instructions to “optimize the return” on their users’ money could mean banks “lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system.”

As skeevy as that admission is, there’s plenty of truth in the fact that our for-profit banking system is simply not designed to handle that volume of consumer-friendly optimization. A casino whose slot machines paid out to every player wouldn’t stay in business very long, after all.

Other finance gurus have pointed to the fact that AI agents might simply go haywire, regardless of what they’ve been instructed to do.

“You’re assuming they’re going to act properly on your behalf and they may not,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told a room full of economists and financial experts in Chicago earlier this month. “You can’t stop it. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it.”

The sorcerer's apprentice applies. 

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images