AI has moved by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, but many traditional institutions haven’t kept up.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that it’s “terrifying” how banks and other financial institutions still accept voice notes or selfies as proof of authentication. He said that these techniques had been conclusively defeated by AI. Altman said that he feared a “fraud crisis” because institutions weren’t aware of what all AI could do.
“I am very nervous about this,” Altman said in a talk with Federal Reserve Vice Chair Michelle Bowman. “A thing that terrifies me is that 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. You say a challenge phrase and they just do it. That is a crazy thing to still be doing,” he added.
“AI has fully defeated that. Most of the ways that people authenticate currently other than like passwords, these like fancy, you know, take a selfie and wave, or do your voice or whatever, I am very nervous that we have an impending, a significant impending fraud crisis because of this,” Altman continued.
“We and other people in the industry have tried to sort of warn people like, hey, just because we’re not releasing the technology doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Some bad actor is going to release it. This is not a super difficult thing to do. This is coming very soon,”
“There’s obviously some reports now of these sort of like ransom attacks where people have the voice of your kid or your parent and they make this urgent call. That is going to get so compelling. Society has to deal with this problem more generally, but people are gonna have to change the way they interact. They’re gonna have to change the way they verify. Like this person (scam) calling me right now, it’s a voice call. Soon it’s gonna be a video, FaceTime. It’ll be indistinguishable from reality. And teaching people how to authenticate in a world like that, how to think about the fraud impact, is a huge deal,” Altman said.
Over the last few years, several new kinds of authentication techniques have become popular. These include taking a selfie, or a short video, or saying a phrase with your voice. These techniques were safe for time time in which they were created, but might not be any more. AI can now create life-like video, and even free tools like Google’s Veo3 now have audio capabilities. Bad actors might have even more powerful tools that have been fine-tuned to perform these actions, and aren’t available to the general public. And with Altman now publicly issuing a warning to banks and financial institutions, it might be time for these organizations to rethink how they authenticate their users.