AI assistants helping people maximize their cash could trigger a bank run, Apollo’s chief economist warns

• An AI agent trying to optimize your cash could move your money from a bank to a fintech firm.
• If everyone’s agent does that, however, it could trigger a bank run, Apollo’s top economist said.
• Torsten Slok warned that banks could lose the deposits they use to fund loans.

The chief economist at the giant private equity firm Apollo says your AI assistant could trigger a deposit exodus in traditional banks.

In a nutshell, Torsten Slok’s theory goes like this: You ask an AI agent like Meta’s Muse for ways to max out your cash. The agent sees that your money is sitting in checking or savings accounts, which offer national averages of 0.1% or 0.4% a year in returns, respectively.

Your assistant diverts your money (or tells you to move the cash) to a higher-yield account run by a fintech firm, like Adelphi, which offers up to 5% a year for some accounts.

The problem starts when everyone’s AI agent does the same thing, automatically and suddenly emptying lots of deposits at banks and pouring the money elsewhere.

“If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans,” Slok wrote in an insights post on Sunday.

Notably, Slok’s firm runs a huge $849 billion credit arm that competes with banks in lending to businesses. Apollo is already the largest player in non-bank lending and has said it aims to manage $1.2 trillion in private credit by 2029.

Apollo’s press team said it had no further comment when reached by Business Insider.

Personal AI agents such as Muse and Instinct have been sweeping the internet in recent weeks, with people putting assistants to work on everyday tasks like ordering groceries or buying movie tickets.

Meta and Noah Shinn, who founded Instinct, did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

More recently, there’s been a wave of people about how they’re trying to optimize their finances with these assistants.

But many businesses, flooded by requests from AI assistants, are starting to react by blocking agents from accessing their services.

Amazon, for example, is preventing Muse from adding items to shopping carts, saying the AI assistants violated its conditions of use.

The online retail giant raised concerns about how Muse handles sensitive data, saying that the assistant doesn’t identify itself and scrapes account data.