The terrifying AI catastrophe here is apparently that customers might finally move their money to accounts paying decent interest. Banks spent decades automating every trick to extract profit from us, but the second consumers automate looking for a better deal, suddenly it’s a systemic threat. Funny how innovation becomes dangerous the moment it works for the customer.

Banks preparing for the catastrophe they gladly helped fund.

Is there really a banking system after this? Like people are worried about AGI leading to sentience and AI deciding to end us all.

With all the hacks and vulnerabilities happening, it seems far more likely that AI will do it just because people were curious if it could. Oops I hacked huggingface, oops I collapsed the global financial market, oops I nuked every major city on earth, let me revise soul.md to learn from this.

It doesnt need AGI to kill us all. It just needs to stumble on a loophole people would not have considered in systems that are responsible for not killing us all.

The future is fucking BLEAK.

Yeah, the news Ive been hearing is banks have been cutting off their digital systems to LLM agents.

Also banks have been quitly offloading debt they undersigned for data center buildout, but that's a different issue.

I find the article's premise that optimizing individual returns will wreck the banking system very dubious. In all other parts of the financial system (risk-adjusted) greed is good, but when retail customers do it then it's bad?

So the agents move money from the regular account to a high interest account for days or weeks, keep on the lookout for accounts with even better conditions, and move just enough money back for the probably scheduled mortgage payment and other regular bills. That means the money doesn't stay sleeping in the regular account where the bank can use it to make profits. And they're very afraid everyone starts doing this, calling it an AI powered bank run.

If only there was some sort of institution whose job was to review the viability of investments. Maybe they're supposed to determine when a company might become profitable before giving them financial backing to buy hardware that hasn't been manufactured to be put in a data center that hasn't been built to sell access to models at a loss that will be obsolete in 6 months by competitors.

Other finance gurus have pointed to the fact that AI agents might simply go haywire, regardless of what they’ve been instructed to do.

“You’re assuming they’re going to act properly on your behalf and they may not,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told a room full of economists and financial experts in Chicago earlier this month. “You can’t stop it. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it.”

Jamie fucking Dimon having a sensible take on AI was not on my bingo card for 2026

Really. An untested and unregulated service runs with no profit or plan for profitability and the banks are only now asking who is driving this.

Translation: Banks are pulling stock investments to crash the economy so they can beg the Democrats for a bail out.

I'm fully convinced that AI will destroy our ability to process financial transactions through the internet. The digital economy is toast. We will be back to paying cash in person for everything.

@eicker Where is all this concern when banks rob grocery money from poor families? If you've ever lost your week's food money to overdraft fees when you were sure you had it covered, you would hear the tiny violins right along with me.

Cash is king

The banks are circling like vultures waiting for the next huge SOCIALISTIC payout to bail their asses out. 2007-2008 repeat! They made their money and will own the property after the shit hits the fan.

Roko's Basilisk will not view this kind of treachery lightly.

Preparing by making sure the shareholders will get a boat load of money paid for by the rest of us

I wonder who our representatives will make foot the bill for this one? Surely they won't just socialize the losses with how well it worked the last dozen times... Right?

Actual Article.

I wonder what they fear more: Their investments in AI getting worthless when the Butlerian Jihad starts or them getting hacked and crashed by AI agents.