AI Agents Threaten to Drain Bank Deposits and Boost Stablecoin Adoption

Apollo Global Management's chief economist and partner, Torsten Slok, has warned that AI Agents could trigger a slow-motion bank run by automatically redirecting household cash toward higher-yield accounts.

Slok noted in a recent note titled 'Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming?' that assistants like Meta Muse can monitor balances in real-time, compare yields across institutions, and move funds without human intervention.

These agents could drain banks' cheap deposits by directing them toward higher-yield accounts, which offer between 3.3% and 5% annual interest, compared to the national average of just 0.1% in traditional checking accounts.

The x402 protocol, developed by Coinbase, already allows AI agents to pay for online services with stablecoins in seconds, with no human approval required. The protocol has processed between 188 and 205 million transactions and has around 69,000 active bots.