Sam Altman is urging financial leaders to learn to outwit the very technology he helped create.
Speaking before a group of financial regulators and industry leaders on Tuesday, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI said financial companies need to do a better job of staying one step ahead of artificial intelligence — or risk losing customers’ money.
“A thing that terrifies me,” he said, “is apparently there are still some financial institutions that will accept a voice print as authentication for you to move a lot of money or do something else.”
“That is a crazy thing to still be doing,” Altman said, saying, “AI has fully defeated most of the ways that people authenticate currently — other than passwords.”
Altman, speaking at an event hosted by the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC, warned against what he called a “significant impending fraud crisis” as a result of AI.
“Society has to deal with this problem more generally, but people are going to have to change the way they interact. They’re going to have to change the way they verify,” he said, adding, “This is a huge deal.”
During the Q&A session, Altman was asked what keeps him up at night, and one of his responses involved a large-scale financial attack.
In that scenario, he predicted someone, perhaps an adversary of the United States, gets a hold of powerful AI to attack the US using bioweapons or to “break into financial systems and take everyone’s money.”
Protecting against that would be tough because the adversary’s AI would be smarter than ours and therefore hard to defeat, he said.
Altman is not alone in his fears. Earlier this year, Accenture surveyed 600 bank cybersecurity leaders, and 80% said they believe generative AI is empowering hackers faster than their banks can respond.
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