AI's threat to your money
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AI's rapid advance is raising the risk of both large-scale attacks on financial infrastructure and small, targeted fraud that can drain individual accounts.
Why it matters: Banks have long been the gold standard for cybersecurity — but they need to move faster in an AI world.
- "AI is making fraud so convincing and so cheap to pull off that we need to rethink how money is stored from the ground up," Laura Spiekerman, cofounder of fraud-prevention firm Alloy, told Axios.
Threat level: Fraudsters are already ahead of the banks, several experts told Axios during a panel on financial infrastructure at the HumanX conference.
- Cryptocurrency offers a security roadmap that fiat currency holders could follow, Spiekerman said: hot wallets connected to software for everyday use, and cold wallets that stay offline for longer-term storage like savings.
- The benefit isn't just the diffusion of risk across wallets; each can have different authentication and protections.
- Some fixes are straightforward, said Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder of global payments platform Yuno. Make people use passkeys — don't make it opt-in. Adding friction around large payments, like secondary verification, can provide an extra layer of defense.
Between the lines: Everyday AI fraud is a growing concern as models get cheaper and more capable — but the bigger threat is infrastructure-level attacks.
- The risk isn't just theoretical.
- Policymakers and banks are already preparing for worst-case scenarios.
Driving the news: Anthropic has begun a tightly controlled release of its Mythos model, the first AI system that it says could cripple parts of the internet, including major financial institutions.
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell called a meeting with the biggest names on Wall Street to discuss Mythos, first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by Axios.
- The meeting focused on risks of AI-powered attacks on bank systems as well as preventative measures.
