Apollo's top economist warns AI money agents could trigger a slow bank run
Torsten Slok says AI assistants that hunt for the best interest rate could pull cheap deposits out of banks all at once — though the warning comes from a firm that would benefit if that happens.
What happened: Apollo Global's chief economist Torsten Slok published a note titled 'Is an Agentic bank run coming?' warning that AI assistants like Meta's Muse could start automatically moving people's cash out of checking and savings accounts. His logic: checking accounts pay a national average of about 0.1% interest, savings about 0.4%, while fintechs such as Revolut, SoFi, Varo, LendingClub and Wealthfront offer 3.3% to 5%. On a $10,000 balance, that's roughly $100 a year versus $10. An AI agent built to maximize your money would naturally move it.
Why it matters: Banks don't just hold deposits, they lend against them, using cheap checking and savings balances to fund loans at low cost. If millions of households let AI agents chase yield at the same time, banks could lose a big chunk of that cheap funding fast, which Slok says would be a problem for the whole financial system, not just individual banks. It's worth noting Apollo runs a roughly $849 billion private credit arm that directly competes with banks for lending business, so the firm has something to gain if deposits move away from banks.
How it works, plainly: Agentic finance means AI that acts instead of just advising: it checks your balances in real time, compares rates across institutions, and shifts idle cash into higher-yield accounts, moving it back before bills are due. Crypto is quietly building the plumbing for this. Coinbase's x402 protocol lets an AI agent pay for services in stablecoins in seconds with no card, account or human approval, and has already logged an estimated 188 to over 205 million transactions from about 69,000 active agents. Cloudflare, Google, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Circle and Stripe have all joined the group governing the standard.
The rollout: This is a warning about what could happen, not something that has happened yet, and estimates of how big agentic finance already is vary wildly, from about $845 million to nearly $8 billion depending on which research firm you ask. Meanwhile friction is already showing up: Amazon has started blocking Meta's Muse from adding items to shopping carts, saying the assistant doesn't identify itself and scrapes account data in ways that violate its terms. Whether banks respond with better rates or new restrictions on agent access remains unclear.