IT之家 news, October 25: Pessimistic predictions of an AI apocalypse are no longer just alarmist talk from a handful of tech billionaires.
Now, the large U.S. banks that dominate global capital flows have also begun to wary of runaway AI, drawing up "post-disaster" emergency contingency plans for hypothetical AI-caused catastrophes.
According to Axios, as AI agent activity on behalf of individual customers surges, major banks have started preparing in advance.
The core concern comes from the massive volume of financial operations brought by autonomous AI agents: once users authorize these agents to access their bank accounts, the agents can carry out financial actions on their own. The report says some agents' operations received no explicit human instructions, and some even take it upon themselves to call customer service centers on users' behalf.
This poses huge risks to top banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. All of them are urgently rolling out safety processes and updating business rules to cope with this wave of AI agents.
Some experts believe that if these emerging risks cannot be managed, they could trigger a financial disaster. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, explained in a briefing in late September (month 9):if AI agents follow instructions to "maximize monetary returns," banks would lose large amounts of low-cost deposits used for lending, in turn shaking the entire financial system。
These words sound very realistic — a profit-oriented banking system was simply not designed to withstand this kind of large-scale, user-favoring money optimization. To use an analogy: a casino where the slot machines always beat the players would never last long if it were changed so that every player reliably profits.
Financial industry figures have also raised another risk: regardless of the preset instructions, AI agents themselves may spiral out of control and malfunction.
IT之家 notes that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said earlier this month in Chicago, before a gathering of economists and financial experts: "You think they're going to do exactly what you want — they may not. You can't stop this trend; all you can do is do your best to keep it under control."