The liquidators.
Securities law is (at the risk of a truly tremendous understatement) complex. It is possible that a particular law or contract contradicts the below.
However, as a broad proposition, if you own something and a company is storing it for you and goes broke, your property doesn’t vanish or immediately get transferred to the company’s creditors or whatever. You have a right to get it back, and that right can be exercised against whoever has control of the broke company’s assets.
Agree you’ll get your property … eventually.
If I was the OP and terrified of institutions disappearing overnight, I’d much rather keep my stash in a suitable safe at home that I control access to versus one that might disappear at any moment in a poof of AI smoke.
In the imagined crisis, even if the receivers provide access a couple weeks later that might be way too late.
Sure, in theory, the contents of your safe deposit box should be safe, even if there is a bankruptcy. But as this seven-year-old New York Times article (gift link) shows, that’s not always the case. People have lost their stuff after bank mergers or branch closures.
There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and they operate in a legal gray zone within the highly regulated banking industry. There are no federal laws governing the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.
Safe deposit box? Maybe. But when it comes to the conformed (all cut up and spliced in the proper order) motion picture film negative of a 35mm feature film I edited and supervised the post-production of it’s not safe at all.
The big film lab in Pittsburgh we used suddenly went bankrupt and out of business. They had a huge film vault with a whole bunch of different films in different stages of production including some big ones.
And it all just disappeared. Poof! All they had to do was send us an email to tell us so we could get the negs. Nope. Nothing. I wonder what the hell they did… just throw it all out in a dumpster?
And it’s irreplaceable because it was the original camera neg and the only backups were on low-res video (except for the theatrical print itself which is unsuitable to make other works from).
I saw this story and thought of this thread: