Skynet is fiction. Delegating control is not.

The unsettling part of an AI wallet is not that it resembles a movie villain. It is that a conversation can become a transaction. OpenAI's launch describes tokenized payments with review and approval for each purchase. Its terms also allow advance authorization: a broader permission, not evidence of unrestricted spending today. It still leaves a different question: did the agent choose the right thing before asking you to approve it? Aviation needs an equally careful distinction. The FAA describes SMART as a recommendation system: specialists validate information and send recommendations through the command structure for local leaders to consider. That is not an AI independently directing every aircraft. After Friday's nationwide ground stop, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the new AI system was not connected to what failed, according to AP. The detailed failure analysis still matters; proximity in time is not proof of causation. The financial concerns in today's Federal Reserve report make the broader question urgent without proving a takeover. Institutions can become dependent on common tools long before any system receives unlimited authority. Approval fatigue, inadequate testing and weak fallback arrangements are plausible ways to erode control, not established findings about these particular products. The useful test is therefore operational: who may authorize an action, what must be checked, and what happens when the system is unavailable or wrong? A human signature matters only if the person has the information, time and practical ability to refuse.