Apollo Global Management partner and Chief Economist Torsten Slock warned that widespread use of autonomous “agentic” AI assistants could drain banks of the cheap deposits they depend on, heightening the risk of bank runs.
What Slock warned
In a short article, Slock wrote that if agentic assistants become common—referencing tools like Meta’s Muse that can operate autonomously without user input—they “could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts.” He added: “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, which would be a problem for the entire financial system.”
The article also points to higher-yield offerings from institutions such as Revolut in the U.S. as potential destinations for these automated cash moves, suggesting traditional savings accounts could become obsolete if agents relentlessly chase yield.
Why it matters for bank funding
The concern centers on uniform, automated behavior: if agents direct cash to the best available yields by default, low-interest checking balances—the cheapest funding for banks—could shrink quickly. According to the article, that kind of deposit flight echoes arguments raised by community banks during debates over whether financial institutions should be able to offer yields on crypto deposits. It further links those fears to the CLARITY Act’s demise in the Senate.
Pushback—and a sharper crisis scenario
Not everyone sees a full-scale bank run. Some critics, as cited in the article, argue the larger risk is the end of cheap funding and lower returns for banks that don’t adapt. Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi stated that “business models built on friction and human laziness will (rightly!) get slaughtered in the coming years.”
Qureshi also warned that in stress events like the one faced by Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in 2023, agentic behavior could make failures unfold faster: these systems have “much lower diversity of behavior than humans,” and “cascading agentic bank runs will likely be more violent and sudden than human ones.”
The crypto-policy echo
While Slock did not mention stablecoins, the article argues his thesis resonates with concerns raised by community banks about allowing yields on crypto deposits—and ties those concerns to the Senate outcome on the CLARITY Act.
Note: Apollo Global Management is described in the article as holding over a trillion dollars in assets under management (AUM). Slock is a former International Monetary Fund employee.
