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.
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.”
More on AI safety: Godfathers of AI Say Models Are So Out of Control That They Need to Be Airgapped for the Safety of Us All
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