The Times warns AI agents could drain bank deposits and spark the next crisis

#What happened

The Times reported today (Oct 2) that economists and policymakers are warning personal AI agents could spark the next banking crisis by draining cheap deposits from mainstream banks ("How your new AI assistant could spark the next bank crisis").

Meta's Muse, released in September, already has three million weekly users and is currently US-only; OpenAI's Dots is US-only at launch.

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, warned in a note this week that if AI agents could move money on users' behalf, they could drain deposits from mainstream banking into the highest-yielding accounts. His figures put the average savings-account rate at 0.4%, per US FDIC data, versus 3–5% at a range of smaller fintechs. "If every household used AI agents to optimise the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system."

The risk is still hypothetical: no launched agent can yet move money between bank accounts. The UK's AI Security Institute studied the impact alongside the Bank of England; the study is unpublished, but Andrew Strait, AISI's former head of societal resilience, said the problems could be "quite severe".

#Why it matters

The pool of money at stake is enormous: CACI data shows £338bn sits in UK savings accounts earning 1.5% or less, £284bn of it in accounts with balances over £10,000.

RBC banking analyst Benjamin Toms says AI could "structurally compress deposit margins" over the long term. Banking stocks have underperformed since Muse launched, with the S&P 500 Financials index hitting its lowest since July last month.

OpenAI's head of personal finance Ethan Bloch pushed back on X: "Consumers want a brand name they can trust with their life savings... Chase has $1trn in deposits even though 98 per cent of it could be earning 350 times the yield. Agents don't change any of this."

#Sources

• The Times: https://www.thetimes.com/business/technology/article/how-ai-assistant-cause-run-banks-mss7vjvgx

Verified October 2, 2026.