Catastrophic talk about the coming AI apocalypse is no longer reserved for the outbursts of a few tech billionaires.
Today, major U.S. banks whose policies dictate capital flows around the world are beginning to worry about malicious AI, preparing contingency plans for the “aftermath” of a theoretical AI-driven catastrophe.
This is according to a new report from Axioswhich notes that banks are preparing for the worst as they experience a sharp increase in AI agent activity on behalf of individual clients.
The main concern appears to be an influx of financial activity driven by autonomous AI agents, granted access to bank accounts by their human users. In some cases, such as Axios As previously noted, these agents perform actions that have not been explicitly motivated by humans – some even going so far as to contact call centers on behalf of their users, without being prompted.
It’s become a major liability for big 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 control emerging risks could lead to financial catastrophe, some experts say. As Torsten Slok, chief economist at wealth management firm Apollo, explained in a late September note, AI agents operating under instructions to “maximize the return” on their users’ money could mean that banks “lose a large portion of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system.”
As skeptical as this admission is, there is a lot of truth in the fact that our for-profit banking system is simply not designed to handle this volume of consumer-friendly optimization. After all, a casino whose slot machines pay each player wouldn’t stay in business for very long.
Other financial gurus have pointed to the fact that AI agents could simply go haywire, regardless of what they’re asked to do.
“You assume they’re going to do the right thing on your behalf and that may not be the case,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told a roomful of economists and financial experts in Chicago earlier this month. “You can’t stop it. You just have to get through it.”
Learn more about AI security: AI godfathers say models are so out of control they must be isolated for all our safety
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