Apollo's Chief Economist Warns AI Agents Could Spark a Bank Run

The chief economist of Apollo Global Management believes agentic AI could trigger a bank run.

The warning came in a brief note, but its implications reach across the banking sector. The economist's concern centers on AI agents — autonomous software tools that can take financial actions on behalf of users without human intervention at every step.

The reference to "Muse" points to a new class of consumer-facing AI agents now entering the market. Unlike traditional chatbots that answer questions, these agents can execute tasks: moving money, opening accounts, and shifting deposits between institutions based on real-time conditions.

That capability is what makes the bank-run scenario plausible, according to the economist. A conventional bank run requires mass human panic — depositors lining up at branches or logging in one by one to withdraw funds. AI agents compress that timeline. If thousands or millions of agents act on the same signal — a negative headline, a dip in a bank's stock, a rumor — they could move deposits in seconds, at a scale and speed no bank liquidity buffer is designed to withstand.

The dynamic echoes, in accelerated form, what regulators saw during the March 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, when digital banking allowed depositors to withdraw roughly $42 billion in a single day. Agentic AI removes even the human friction that still constrained that outflow.

For Apollo, a private-equity giant with deep exposure to credit markets, the concern is not academic. A sudden deposit flight would hit the funding side of the banking system and ripple into leveraged credit, where Apollo operates at scale.

The note did not call for banning AI agents, according to the source material. It flagged the structural risk: the banking system's stability has long rested on depositor inertia — money that sits still. Agents that never sleep, never panic, and never hesitate break that assumption.

The question now facing banks and regulators is whether liquidity requirements, deposit insurance design, and circuit-breaker mechanics built for human-speed runs can hold when the runners move at machine speed.