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.

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?

The usual financial crisis playbook has a remarkably consistent cast: 1. banks discover a new way to create risk, 2. executives collect bonuses while it works, and 3. taxpayers get invited to the emergency meeting when it doesn’t. 👉 Somehow the public is always a stakeholder in the losses, but never in the profits.

Note to self: automate utilities churning and deal hunting to maximise savings.

@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.

Actual Article.

This is clearly the exit strategy here. That's why AI companies' try to label their products as "dangerous" and call for their own regulation. On the one hand, they want to be regarded as a matter of "national security" because they bloody well know that this gives them access to taxpayer money, which in turn can bail them out of their failing bet on data center build-out. On the other hand, it helps them shift liability onto regulators if things go south and allows them to say: "We told you we wanted regulation, but you wouldn't listen."

Don't forget the other option 3: they want regulation to pull the ladder up behind them so there can be no competition. The open models from China have already proven their 'special' technology can be easily improved upon.

Banks Planning Unprecedented Catastrophe Caused by AI That They Will Make Profit From.

FTFY

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?

True; I skipped this part because the comment I was replying to was about taxpayer money bailouts. What you're describing is the creation of an artificial moat against competitors. And it is correct that this is also a motive behind pushing for regulation.

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.

Almost like the system is designed to increase wealth inequality 🤯

Banks are the largest mafia on the planet. They literally have a license to print money. Not even the government can do this. When things go south, they are bailed out with our money. Even after the worst crisis, they have a ridiculously low capital requirement of 2.5%.

Never expect criminal scum to just accept one of their sources of income being taken away.

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

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.

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

Shit, I've been doing this manually. It takes maybe an hour of combined time to look on NerdWallet for the highest APY HYSA, make an account, link the old one, move everything over, and close out the old one. Automating that sounds nice though.

Banks were condemned for money laundering.

They helped drug traffickers to launder their blood money...5 billions of suspicious transactions in bank of america and they looked the other way.

Usually banks dislike money laundering in a form where they have to actively look away... They prefer to maintain plausable deniability...

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.

Ooh, I know, my comment was pure unadulterated sarcasm.

What if this is Roko's Basilisk

Yet people write off Bitcoin as "for criminals" while glossing over the fact no one can print more of it, and it cannot be taken away from you (without you fucking up).

There is literally no better option in terms of holding and protecting your own wealth.

Yet still, in 2026, I can almost guarantee nothing but down votes and/or replies all about how it's BS, etc, etc.

Not trying to be snarky, it's just sad that the vast majority of people won't ever get a good explanation of how it works.

Why not fear both? It has gotten to the level where it doesn't live up to the investment levels and crashes, or it absolutely lives up to it and just trashes the economy in various ways.

i think that may be an improvement.

I did hate carrying change though. I'm never happy

I'm a bit torn on Bitcoin. I used to think the same as you, but now it seems to me that Bitcoin is way too easy to control. State actors could quite easily acquire enough hash power to take over the network, mining is too concentrated already. I think Monero is much more true to the original idea of Bitcoin, probably also one of the reasons it's always branded as a coin for criminals, to prevent people from looking into it.

It's also, unfortunately, just not that practical. Most people don't want to be their own bank. Your "unless you fuck up" is not quite true, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don't hand over your keys? That's the true purpose of a bank, outsourced security.

While crypto is cool, it's not required to solve this, full-reserve banking would be sufficient.

Mr. Banks declared, "YOU CAN'T STOP IT, THE UNPRECEDENTED CATASTROPHE CAUSED BY THE AIS, THEY ARE COMING FOR ALL OF US!!"

What hints at them trying to crash it? Or you're thinking that they're trying to crash to keep the markets reliance on bank loans?

Hell yeah. Bring it on

Banks preparing for the catastrophe they gladly helped fund.

Can't touch this!

Neither actually, according to the article. They are afraid the customers who let AI loose on their own accounts will withdraw too much deposits to invest so that the banks can't give out loans anymore. I wish I were making this up...

Don't worry, inflation is making it so a single dollar will be practically useless soon. Literally nobody will give a fuck about coins. A homeless person would spit in your face if you gave him 50 cents, because it'd be that insulting. Coins will have a melt value significantly higher than their face value.

I'm astonished that anyone would trust their bank login to a chatbot. But if you read the article, the banks aren't worried about depositors loosing money, they're worried about AI getting a better deal for their customers.

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

Bitcoin is way too easy to control.

Bitcoin is the hardest form of money in existence to control. Manipulation is not control. I'm pretty sure you're thinking of manipulation.

State actors could quite easily acquire enough hash power to take over the network

With respect, you need to learn more about how Bitcoin works, in particular the concept of "difficulty" and also options for defending against bad actors. Or you think the decade and a half plus Bitcoin has been running, not one single person/entity/state actor would try it?

mining is too concentrated already

TOO concentrated? No, otherwise Bitcoin wouldn't exist anymore. Could it be less concentrated? For sure. Couldn't the power the polticians and banks have be less concentrated? And it's within most people's means to be part of the solution against mining concentration...see: OCEAN pool for one.

Most people don't want to be their own bank.

Most people don't. Having bitcoin doesn't mean you have to be your own bank. Just that you have that option if and when the need arises. It's not one extreme (be your own bank) or the other (reject bitcoin entirely).

what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don't hand over your keys?

Well, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don't hand over your cash, credit cards, and valuable possessions? I for one could a) say that I don't memorise my keys and they are stored outside of my home, b) give them keys to a duress wallet. What can you do?

I can't say Bitcoin is the only solution to things, but it's by far the best tool we've been given so far. My argument has always been, the only way Bitcoin dies is if the whole advanced world works together to ban it. And if you think the whole world is going to cooperate on anything when self-interest and game theory heavily incentivizes involvement.....

Just take some time to learn about how it works, not just "what it is". That's what holds people back.

Hey crypto-investor! I'm letting you know I'm about to print my own crypto from the open-source bitcoin! Buy my alt-coins now! Your profits are about to go to the moon! Buy CON-coin! The only difference between it and bitcoin is hype and branding! Get in before it's too late! Computers go brrrrrr infinite ponzi-schemes.

Impossible. The elite want to know where every penny you spend goes, and it's too hard with cash

You're more likely to see credit cards only allowed through Google Pay or Apple Pay than going back to cash

They'll claim it's having to support so many third party's in the chain causing the problem, so we need 2 "trusted" entities

Welcome to reality very late! We will take it for the companies for no reason once again.

Uh yep, pretty much what I expected 😂

The hard part is people that seriously think like that don't realize how utterly and completely stupid they sound to anyone who does take the time to understand it. They'll happily go through life saying stuff like that and never actually be able to make a good argument.

Edit: omg that wasn't satire.....my bad. Sorry I even replied 😂

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.

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.

I don't think that's what the elites intend. I think their arrogance will lead them to think they can control something they don't understand and that will bite us all in the ass

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.

Or even make the people who borrowed the money actually pay it back, or go bankrupt, like we would have to, billionaires be like, too broke, can't pay, meh, excuse me while I holiday on my fourth favourite yacht at my own private island.

The banks? I'd believe it

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

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.

Kinda like billionaires with their apocalypse shelters. If they had any self-awareness, they could just stop and maybe invest in mitigation and prevention of certain catastrophic scenarios.

But no matter how rich they are, they just want more and can't help themselves.

Banks and businesses are not self-aware either.