(24 July 2025 – Global) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned the financial services sector of a “significant impending fraud crisis” as artificial intelligence (AI) tools are used by bad actors to impersonate a person’s voice or face to bypass security checks and transfer funds.
High net worth individual (HNWI) bank clients often utilise voice printing as an identification feature, growing in popularity in the last ten years with customers typically requested to quote a challenge phrase into the phone to access their accounts and authorise transfers. But now AI voice clones, and eventually video clones, can impersonate people in a way that Altman said is increasingly “indistinguishable from reality” and will require new methods for verification.
“A thing that terrifies me is apparently there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication. That is a crazy thing to still be doing. AI has fully defeated that. Some bad actor is going to release it. This is coming very, very soon” stated OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at a Federal Reserve conference in Washington.
“The core problem is that KYC exists to verify “who” is making the transaction. If AI can perfectly mimic voice and face, you’re not authenticating the customer. You’re authenticating anyone with the right software. This creates a compliance crisis as every voice-authenticated transaction is potentially non-compliant. When regulators ask, ‘How do you “know” your customer made this trade?’ and the answer becomes ‘Well, it sounded like them…’, that’s not KYC. That’s wishful thinking” commented Sardine Head of Strategy and Content, Simon Taylor.
“The solution? KYC needs to be always on. The industry has talked about “perpetual KYC” for a decade but very few do it in practice. Every signal, every tap, swipe, or interaction needs to feed a real time risk score and set of models to understand is this a human. And as an industry we need to get much better at detecting bad software and malware.”