Sam Altman warns AI could outsmart banks and steal your money
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is warning banks and financial institutions about AI-driven fraud. He highlights how voice clones and deepfakes are already bypassing current security systems, posing a serious threat to people’s money.
AI is becoming smarter and is helping humans in all possible ways. But not all work done using AI is in good faith. For instance, AI is also being aggressively used by cybercriminals to plan tricks to dupe people out of their money. Deepfake, which is the word for AI-generated videos, is becoming a global concern and now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is urging banks and financial institutions to be smarter than the smartest AI to protect money.
Speaking at a Federal Reserve conference, Altman warned that financial institutions are dangerously underestimating the growing threat of AI-driven fraud. He highlighted how artificial intelligence is already capable of defeating many advanced security systems, and if this issue is not addressed, the consequences could be devastating.
“A thing that terrifies me is that there are still some financial institutions that accept voiceprints as authentication,” Altman said during the session (via CNN). “That is a crazy thing to still be doing. AI has fully defeated most of the ways that people authenticate currently.”
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity.1 In the past, a skilled forger could pass a bad check by replicating a person’s signature. Now, advances in AI can do much more damage by replicating a person’s entire identity. This technology—known as deepfakes—has the potential to supercharge identity fraud. I’ve recently spoken about the importance of recognizing both the benefits and the risks of generative AI (Gen AI).2 Today, I’d like to focus more on the darker side of the technology—specifically how Gen AI has the potential to enable deepfake technology, and what we should be doing now to defend against this risk in finance.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/barr20250417a.htm