Apollo Economist Warns AI Agents Could Trigger an Agentic Bank Run
Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok has outlined a scenario in which AI agents drain bank deposits without any human panic driving it. The agents would automatically move clients’ idle cash out of accounts paying 0.1% and into instruments yielding 3.3% to 5%, sweeping balances that previously stayed put because of human inertia.
If that behavior becomes widespread, banks could lose cheap deposits quickly, and those deposits are what fund their lending. Slok frames the idea as a forecast rather than an outflow already under way. The novel part is the mechanism: money that sat still because moving it took effort becomes trivial to move once an agent handles it.
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