Artificial intelligence is making sanctions and export-control evasion schemes harder to detect by enabling the creation of realistic fake companies and phony documentation used to obviate international trade restrictions, a trade lawyer said at the Dow Jones Risk Journal Summit.

Aiysha Hussain, a trade partner at Mayer Brown, said companies and individuals blocked by sanctions and export controls can use AI to generate webpages and documents that appear legitimate, allowing them to route transactions through fabricated entities, according to a Dow Jones Risk Journal report on the talks.  

“We’ve seen AI-generated documents and they look real, they look good, and you sometimes can’t detect what’s real and what’s not,” Hussain said in the report. “So I do think evasion is going to be tougher to crack as people become more sophisticated with using AI.”

The comments came during a panel discussion on the evolving landscape of sanctions and export-control risks. 

Janet Labuda, head of customs and trade issues at Maersk Customs Services, said she has been alarmed by the prospect of executives facing criminal charges for facilitating evasion schemes, according to the news outlet. She pointed to a new trade fraud task force housed in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and working with the Department of Homeland Security as evidence the U.S. government is treating the issue with increased seriousness.

“They’ve made it very, very clear that it’s not just they’re going to prosecute the company as an entity, but they’re going to start to look at who really orchestrated the transaction,” Labuda told summit attendees, who also heard discussion of the increasing importance of trade compliance in the sector. 

Read more at Dow Jones Risk Journal