Altman sounds alarm on voice cloning fraud

The world may be on the brink of a “significant, impending fraud crisis,” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman warned on Tuesday, as rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) tools enable criminals to impersonate voices and identities with alarming ease.

Speaking at the Federal Reserve’s Capital Framework for Large Banks conference, Altman said it was “terrifying” that some financial institutions still accept voiceprints for authentication, a method he called dangerously outdated in the age of AI.

“A thing that terrifies me 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 — you say a challenge phrase, and they just do it,” Altman said during a fireside chat at the Federal Reserve’s Capital Framework for Large Banks conference. “That is a crazy thing to still be doing… AI has fully defeated most of the ways that people authenticate currently, other than passwords.”

Speaking to an audience that included representatives of major US financial institutions and Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision Michelle Bowman, Altman described how AI-powered voice and video cloning tools are already being used in scams and identity theft.

“I am very nervous that we have an impending, significant, impending fraud crisis,” he said. “Right now, it’s a voice call; soon it’s going be a video or FaceTime that’s indistinguishable from reality.”

He added that while OpenAI is not building such impersonation tools, “it’s a challenge the world will soon need to confront as AI continues to evolve.”

His comments come after the FBI last year warned about AI voice and video “cloning” scams.

Earlier this month, US officials disclosed that someone using AI to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s voice had contacted foreign ministers, a governor and a member of Congress.

Parents have also reported receiving fake emergency calls in their children’s voices, generated with AI to extort money.

To address these challenges, Altman is backing a project called The Orb, created by Tools for Humanity, which aims to offer “proof of human” authentication in a digital world where it is increasingly hard to tell who or what is real.

Altman also reiterated his fears about bad actors misusing AI “superintelligence” before the world is ready to defend against it, warning of scenarios where an adversary could attack the US financial system or create a bioweapon.

“What keeps me up at night,” he said, is the possibility of humans losing control of superintelligent systems or handing over too much decision-making power to machines.

At the same time, Altman expressed skepticism about dire predictions that AI will cause mass unemployment in the near term.

“No one knows what happens next,” he said. “There’s a lot of these really smart-sounding predictions… No one knows that. In my opinion, this is too complex of a system, this is too new and impactful of a technology, it’s very hard to predict.”

He did, however, acknowledge that “entire classes of jobs will go away,” but suggested that new types of work will emerge.

Looking further ahead, he predicted that workers in a century may no longer have what are today considered “real jobs.”

“You have everything you could possibly need. You have nothing to do,” he said. “So, you’re making up a job to play a silly status game and to fill your time and to feel useful to other people.”

On specific sectors, Altman declared customer support “totally gone” as an employment category.

“Now you call one of these things and AI answers,” he said. “It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it’s done.”

He also said ChatGPT today is already “a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” but stopped short of advocating for removing humans entirely from healthcare decisions.

“I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop,” he said.

In conjunction with Altman’s speech, OpenAI released a report by chief economist Ronnie Chatterji highlighting ChatGPT’s productivity benefits.

Chatterji compared AI’s impact to transformative technologies such as electricity and the transistor, noting that ChatGPT now has 500 million users globally.

Among US users, 20% use it as a “personalized tutor” for “learning and upskilling,” and more than half of US users are between 18 and 34.

Chatterji plans to work with economists Jason Furman and Michael Strain over the next year on a deeper study of AI’s workforce impact, which will take place in OpenAI’s upcoming Washington, DC, office.

On Tuesday, OpenAI confirmed plans to open that office early next year to house its roughly 30-person Washington workforce.

The office, led by Chan Park and Joe Larson, will host policymakers, preview new technology, provide AI training for teachers and officials, and support research on AI’s economic effects and accessibility.

Altman’s visit coincided with the Trump administration’s expected release of its “AI Action Plan,” a policy document aimed at easing regulations and shoring up US dominance in AI.

OpenAI has lobbied against regulations it argues would weaken US competitiveness relative to foreign rivals. Earlier this month, the Senate struck down a Trump-backed provision that would have barred states from enforcing AI laws for a decade.

During his remarks, Altman noted the shift in Washington’s tone on AI, saying that under Trump the emphasis has moved to accelerating development to outpace China.

“One of my biggest worries,” he said, is how fast AI’s destructive capabilities are advancing, especially in the hands of hostile nations, compared with the pace of defenses.

Altman is scheduled to return to Capitol Hill for more congressional testimony following his appearance before the Senate commerce committee, continuing a Washington pivot that has placed him in the center of US policy debates over AI’s promise and peril.