OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued a fairly dire warning about how some personal security apparatuses — particularly things we use to guard our bank accounts and the like — are highly vulnerable to AI-based fraud.

Sam Altman was in Washington, DC Tuesday and gave what CNN describes as "a wide-ranging interview about the economic and societal impacts of AI" at the Federal Reserve.

Altman warned of the range of fraud that could be on the horizon as bad actors get a handle on how to use different kinds of AI tools.

"I am very nervous that we have an impending, significant, impending fraud crisis,” Altman said.

"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, per CNN. "That is a crazy thing to still be doing… AI has fully defeated most of the ways that people authenticate currently, other than passwords."

As CNN notes, the FBI previously warned of voice-cloning fraud schemes like this being used by criminals, including those who try to impersonate family members to call people and pretend to be in trouble, asking for money.

Altman warned while it might be voice-fraud for now, "soon it’s going be a video or FaceTime that’s indistinguishable from reality."

Altman further used the talk to plug his project The Orb, by Tools for Humanity/World Networks, which we learned about in May as that company opened a new showroom of sorts on Union Square. The company has a mission to create an anonymized, blockchain-based "proof of human" identification system for people to use online, called a World ID, that requires an Orb device for secure identification. The device is also intended to become a potential point-of-sale device in the future.

Top image: Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 at Moscone Center on June 02, 2025 in San Francisco, California. Snowflake Summit 2025 runs through June 5th. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)