Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told policymakers at the fund's annual meetings in Bangkok that artificial intelligence is putting "the potential of digital fraud on steroids". She highlighted the case of French supermarket chains that had to discard spoiled food after hackers accessed their fridge controls and raised temperatures to 50 degrees Celsius, using the incident to underline growing concerns about cyber-attacks on critical systems.
Georgieva expressed particular alarm that cybercrime turbocharged by AI could erode public confidence in the financial system itself. She warned that widespread cyber-fraud could push people to distrust mainstream banks and hoard cash, recalling how citizens in her native Bulgaria during the Cold War kept money in shoeboxes under their beds rather than trusting institutions. "Unless we figure out how to get ahead of this curve, we may end up with lots of people with shoeboxes under their beds," she said.
A separate emerging threat centres on artificial intelligence agents that offer to manage users' financial decisions automatically. JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon warned his bank would not permit such digital agents to operate on customer accounts, saying "you don't want rogue agents, and there could be thousands of them". Financial regulators fear that widespread use of AI agents to move deposits between institutions could trigger sudden bank runs during market uncertainty, and worry about unclear legal responsibility if an AI agent makes decisions that prove disastrous or criminal.
Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England and chair of the Financial Stability Board of global central bankers, raised another concern: Anthropic warned this week that AI models might soon be able to self-replicate on domestic internet-connected devices. The question of who bears responsibility and costs if internet-enabled appliances are hijacked by self-replicating software remains unanswered. "If we don't have trust in money, we don't operate as a society," Bailey said.
Some progress is being made. Trump's superintelligence taskforce, chaired by national intelligence director Jay Clayton, is establishing mechanisms for AI laboratories to report "breaches, hacks, jailbreaks, and other issues". The UK has pledged to tackle AI safety as part of its G20 presidency next year, and G7 finance ministers announced in Bangkok that they would run simulations to test global financial system resilience against cyber-attacks. However, international cooperation appears uncertain as the challenges grow.
For UK savers, borrowers and businesses, loss of confidence in the financial system through cyber-attacks or AI-driven fraud could undermine trust in banks and money itself, potentially disrupting the smooth operation of the economy.