As AI agents begin to conduct economic work and transact with each other, they will create an "agentic economy." Our current financial system is ill-equipped for this future, lacking the ability to handle the billions of instant, global, and micro-scale transactions that will become commonplace.

Historically, time and cost acted as a natural defense against overwhelming systems. AI agents can now execute millions of tasks—like filing legal motions or making lowball offers—for nearly free, threatening to collapse systems not built for this scale.

If AI wealth management becomes mainstream and models rely on similar data signals, it could create a "herd problem." All AIs might execute the same buy or sell trades simultaneously, leading to synchronized panics or euphoric bubbles and unprecedented market volatility.

An economist's warning of an agent-driven bank run highlights a systemic risk: many industries rely on consumer inertia and complexity for profit. AI agents that automatically optimize choices for users—like moving cash to high-yield accounts—could destabilize these established economic models by removing this profitable friction at scale.

While fears of a powerful AI hacking financial systems are valid, the more immediate and destructive risk is public perception. Widespread fear of a potential hack could trigger a bank run, destabilizing the financial system before any actual breach even occurs.

AI agents will evolve beyond simple transactions to become sophisticated DeFi participants. By accumulating assets from their economic activities, they will need to run treasuries, autonomously using DeFi rails for asset allocation, yield farming, and risk management, effectively operating as decentralized, automated hedge funds.

While AI currently gives Nubank an edge, its long-term effect could commoditize the entire banking industry. AI agents could constantly optimize consumers' finances, automatically switching them to the lowest-rate products and eroding industry-wide margins.

The massive capital allocation into AI is creating a liquidity vacuum in other sectors like crypto. This concentration of capital, similar to the pre-2008 environment, makes the system vulnerable to a sudden shift in sentiment where a lack of lending could trigger a widespread crisis.

The key threat from AI isn't just its capability, but the unprecedented speed of its improvement. Unlike past technological shifts that unfolded over decades, AI agent autonomy on complex tasks has grown exponentially in just two years. This rapid acceleration is what financial systems and labor markets are not stress-tested for.