AI agents could make it easier for households to shift cash from low-paying checking accounts into higher-yield alternatives, potentially putting pressure on banks’ inexpensive deposit funding, Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok warned.

In a Sunday note titled “Is an Agentic bank run coming?”, Slok said AI assistants could eventually monitor household finances and automatically move idle cash to whichever accounts offer better returns.

He pointed to Meta’s personal agent Muse and similar agentic AI systems as examples of tools that could perform these transfers automatically. Instead of earning the roughly 0.1% national average on checking accounts, household cash could be redirected to accounts offering substantially higher interest.

Slok is a widely followed investment economist on Wall Street and a partner at Apollo Global, which manages roughly $1 trillion in assets.

He highlighted Revolut, SoFi, Varo, LendingClub and Wealthfront, which offer deposit rates between 3.3% and 5% annually. For a $10,000 balance, that would amount to roughly $330 to $500 in annual interest, compared with about $10 at a 0.1% checking-account rate.

Slok said widespread adoption of AI-powered cash management could challenge banks because they rely on low-cost deposits to fund loans. If households automatically move money whenever a higher rate becomes available, banks could lose a portion of those deposits and potentially face higher funding costs.

“If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans,” Slok wrote, warning that such a shift could have consequences for the broader financial system.

AI Takes Action Instead of Just Giving Advice

Agentic finance refers to AI systems that can execute financial tasks independently rather than simply answer questions.

These agents could track balances in real time, compare deposit rates across institutions, transfer excess cash into higher-yield accounts and return the money before bills become due.

Market estimates vary widely. Mordor Intelligence values agentic AI in financial services at $7.78 billion in 2026 and forecasts growth to $43.52 billion by 2031. MarketsandMarkets estimates the narrower AI agents segment at about $845 million in 2025.

Crypto Infrastructure Could Support AI Payments

The crypto industry is already developing payment infrastructure that could allow AI agents to conduct transactions autonomously.

Coinbase’s x402 protocol allows AI agents to pay for online services in stablecoins within seconds without a conventional account, payment card or human approval for each transaction.

The x402 Protocol has reportedly processed approximately 188 million to more than 205 million cumulative transactions, with around 69,000 active agents.

Cloudflare, Google, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Circle and Stripe have joined the x402 Foundation, which is governed by the Linux Foundation.

Nate Geraci, co-founder of the ETF Institute, has previously said that AI and crypto could both challenge the traditional banking model as more financial activity becomes automated.