Wall Street prepares for AI's "day after"

America's largest banks are working to prevent AI worst-case scenarios. But they're also preparing for the "day after" a catastrophe, Axios has learned. Why it matters: America's financial institutions have joined the largest AI companies in scenario-planning for disaster, a prudent but worrisome signal about the extent of the risk that major corporations see on the horizon. State of play: Banks are experiencing unvetted AI agent activity, primarily driven by customers providing login credentials to agents, which in some cases appear to have taken actions independent of user prompts, Axios reported Thursday . The activity is distinct from the rogue behavior involved in a summer attack on a startup called Hugging Face , where an AI agent swarm hacked its platform in an episode that kicked off an industry security crisis. Instead, banks fear the ripple effects and risks that extend from users allowing agents to log in to their accounts and take action, especially since agents could take steps users haven't sanctioned. Concerns about frontier AI systems, not AI agents, have led banks to invest in prevention and to plan for the worst. Zoom in: The Axios report came amid growing concerns about a burgeoning cybersecurity crisis. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff posted "code red" on X, quoting an Anthropic security employee who said "as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better." The Anthropic employee was referring to security researchers finding major vulnerabilities in a programming language used to run millions of websites, marking one of the most consequential cybersecurity discoveries yet made with AI . The Axios report on banks, which referred to agentic AI, not frontier AI systems, sparked calls for regulation from across the political spectrum, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). Former White House AI czar David Sacks said banks should support user-di