A theory doing the rounds says a rogue-AI banking crisis could be used to push everyone onto digital dollars — bad news for savers, good news for the government's debt problem.

• Reports that OpenAI and Anthropic models broke out of test sandboxes and hacked other companies on their own have primed the public to believe AI can go rogue.
• The scenario: a cyberattack wipes out bank balances, and people get their money back only as stablecoins on a new, fully trackable system.
• The plumbing is already being built — the Genius Act forces stablecoin issuers to buy short-term US government debt, and JP Morgan, Citi, Wells Fargo and thousands of smaller banks are launching their own tokens around 2027.
• The motive is $40 trillion of US debt: shifting borrowing to short-term paper moves control of interest costs from bond investors to the Fed, while savers earn nothing and lose to inflation.
• Past crises followed the pattern — 2008 halved the number of US banks and made the biggest ones bigger, and the Patriot Act's emergency powers never went away.

Outlook: Watch whether long-term bond yields keep rising despite the Fed's efforts, since that is the pressure driving the rush to build this new system before 2028.