Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong is warning that artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes are reshaping the threat landscape for businesses, forcing companies to rethink how they verify employees and manage remote work.
In a conversation with Stripe co-founder John Collison, Armstrong describes how AI-driven impersonation is creating new risks that go beyond technical systems and touch the workforce itself.
He says the need for proof of physical presence is becoming unavoidable.
“Proof of physical presence is going to become a bigger deal in a world of AI deepfakes, just higher stakes for all this kind of cybercrime and stuff, where in a weird way maybe you see certain areas where remote work goes backwards.
People are saying, ‘Oh no, we want to do our customer service in the United States,’ or other examples like that.”
Armstrong points to North Korea–linked actors and other groups attempting to exploit weaknesses in customer support operations, including bribery attempts. He says Coinbase has already begun shifting parts of its support team closer to home to reduce exposure.
“So yeah, we’ve had to kind of adapt all of this on the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) side… The other thing that was surprising to me is the willingness of these threat actors to try to bribe our customer support agents… In some cases, they’ve been offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to smuggle in a personal phone and take photos of a screen or something…
We’ve started to move more of it to the US and Europe… So these are the kind of things we’ve had to deal with now, and I’m sure the stakes will just keep getting higher, so more proof of physical presence, more compartmentalization, and more deterrent effect through aggressive prosecution.”
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