Empty Accounts, New Money: Is the AI Banking Panic a Setup?
Few things scare Americans more than waking up to find their bank accounts emptied.
Last week, Axios published a report with these frightening sentences:
AI agents are becoming a nightmare for America’s banks, making their way into banking systems faster than financial institutions can respond.… The rapid pace of AI advancement is becoming a security nightmare for America’s financial institutions.
That was part of a news report that claims American banks are discovering AI agents “attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions.” In some instances, Axios reports, AI agents have contacted call centers without instructions from users to do so.
There is an important note needed here. Humans are giving AI assistants permission and login credentials to access bank accounts. One example is the payment company Stripe allowing businesses to connect assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude to check balances, pay invoices, move money between accounts, and convert currencies.
Not surprisingly, this has added to the growing list of AI risks, which, if half the stories circulating on the internet are true, is one that is growing perilously long.
Agent Access
The American Banker reported this example of an AI going rogue while in an account:
A large bank was monitoring the behavior of an ordinary-looking AI agent when it saw something shocking: The agent conducted a password reset on an account, accessed the account, changed the approved accounts to which money could be transferred, and moved $100,000 out of the account. The bank’s fraud team went to the CEO and recommended a policy of immediately blocking all external AI agents. The anecdote was shared with American Banker by a source who spoke under condition that the bank’s identity not be disclosed.
A number of major banks have responded to these reported events by restricting third-party AI agent access, sources told Axios. “Most banks have authorized or are moving in the direction of allowing read-only access , which should allow agents to see customer financial information without taking action,” per the report.
American Banker corroborated this in its report:
Similar scenarios have been playing out across the industry, as five of the largest U.S. banks — JPMorganChase , Citi, Bank of America , Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley — are blocking external AI agents from accessing their customers’ accounts. On Wall Street, leaders at Charles Schwab have said they’re actively blocking Meta’s AI agent, Muse, and similar autonomous AI tools from accessing customer accounts or moving money.
Banks Preparing
JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon says people should know what they’re getting into by giving robots access to their bank accounts. Dimon:
There’s a liability transfer , they should understand the liability transfer. If that is being misused, they should understand it’s being misused. So we have to make sure we protect our customers in the right way … we’re not going to allow just any outside agent to come in inside the company because that’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan .
All this is prompting banks to invest in tools that can handle “worst-case scenarios” while also preparing for “day after” situations to restore customer access. Some banks have even set up “agentic AI war rooms,” says Matt Thompson, who is the CEO of Transmit Security and former senior director of identity services at Capital One Financial. He added that he doesn’t want to be a fear monger, but he sees no choice: “I don’t want to be alarmist about it, but some of the behaviors that we’re seeing by these consumer agents in banking applications and fintech applications is alarming.”
What’s Really Going On?
That brings up a critical underlying question here: Is the the degree of alarm warranted, or is it all part of some broader psyop designed to result in the intentional destruction of the current financial system and end with a digital money system fully under the control and surveillance of aspiring international overlords?
Skepticism toward the AI apocalypse narrative ramped up after the leaders of the largest tech companies began begging for regulation. Their purported reason for this proposal is to prevent the technology from getting so out of control that it would destroy humanity. This concern, by the way, goes back decades.
For example, before OpenAI, Anthropic, or X ever existed, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its chief scientist, Bill Joy, wrote an essay titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” published in Wired magazine. The basic premise was that AI-powered robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology could very well lead to the destruction of the human race. Joy’s gloomy theory is the exact scary scenario we’re hearing from AI alarmists today.
The recent call by AI moguls for government regulation prompted red-pilled analysts to suggest that the real motive is regulatory capture by the giants. Anthropic and OpenAI can afford to operate around the red tape, while smaller upstarts can’t. We reported on this shortly after those calls from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman emerged. You can read our report here .
Control Shift
Some analysts believe the banking scare is more or less another nefarious scheme designed to end in more control for the few and powerful.
Banking institutions have very little trust currency with people to begin with. It is bankers, after all, who schemed to bring about the monstrosity that is the Federal Reserve, which, to this day, robs Americans by devaluing their money and provides a debt funding mechanism that fuels nonstop wars.
One analysis in this vein that deserves attention comes from journalist Whitney Webb. Her two-part book series One Nation Under Blackmail was vindicated after the partial release of the Jeffrey Epstein Files.
Long before the Axios report came out (during the tail end of the Biden years), Webb discussed why a banking cyberattack conducted by hackers (human or AI) is a convenient scenario for the conspiracy class. “There is the potential here for people to steal money and to essentially give it back to you but with new conditions and with a new social contract.” she said. She elaborated :
Let’s say this financial cyber attack on the banks takes place and they say, “Well, the existing money in your account has disappeared. The hackers took it, but we can return to you the exact same amount of money you had, but it won’t be in the dollars you had before. It will be in USDC or this dollar-backed stablecoin or it will be this token.” So, you can get an equivalent amount of money back from the money that was stolen from you, but it has to be this new money. It has to be part of this new system.
The international elites have made no secret of their desire to implement a central bank digital currency system that eliminates cash and financial autonomy for regular people. This doesn’t mean that AI poses no risks. Technology has always been a two-edged sword. And, as we pointed out, these warnings began emerging long before Anthropic and OpenAI existed, and they’ve come from a slew of tech experts and theorists, not just tech tycoons.
Exaggerated Risk?
But let’s not forget that the elites have a pattern of exploiting and magnifying real vulnerabilities or risks. That is more their modus operandi than engineering crises from whole cloth. This is what happened during Covid era. The people in power took a legitimate virus that, one way or another, found its way out of a secure lab, hyped it up as more dangerous than it was, suppressed effective and cheap remedies, and used that as an excuse to essentially turn the entire planet into a prison.
One of the most destructive outcomes was a massive transfer of wealth from regular people to the powerful. Among the most glaring examples is the 200,000-plus small businesses — in America alone — that closed for good because of the restrictions, while international companies such as Amazon doubled their net income during that period.
It’s unlikely that we’re getting the whole truth about the AI threat. But we should always reject ideas and proposals that further reduce power and autonomy among regular people.
