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The Trump administration is weighing a possible executive order or other action that would require banks to collect citizenship information from customers, a new front in the administration’s crackdown on immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, according to people familiar with the matter.

The action, which is primarily under review by the Treasury Department, could ultimately task banks with asking for an unprecedented new category of documents, such as a passports, from both new and existing customers who want to maintain a bank account in the U.S., the people said.

Discussions about the potential executive order have alarmed banks, which have lobbied Treasury and questioned the legal basis for the proposal, some of the people said.

From: Exclusive | Trump Administration Considers Requiring Banks to Collect Citizenship Information – WSJ.

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That’s because bridgers perform three critical functions: They curate partners, translate across boundaries, and integrate partners’ disparate efforts. But far too few companies have this critical type of leader.

From: Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale.

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Innovation increasingly depends on partnerships. As complexity and specialization rise and technologies such as AI reshape workflows and product portfolios, no single team or company has all the capabilities, tools, or authority needed to move ideas from prototype to scale.

From: Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale.

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OpenClaw presents a so-called shadow AI threat that is highly relevant to banks, where employees frequently seek out unsanctioned tools to speed up their workloads.

Security researchers at Bitsight detected OpenClaw instances operating within sensitive industries, including finance, according to a Feb. 9 blog post from the cyber risk management firm. The U.S. currently hosts the largest global concentration of these exposed OpenClaw deployments.

Furthermore, cybersecurity firm Token Security observed OpenClaw or its variants actively running on employee devices in up to 22% of its monitored customer environments, according to a Feb. 11 threat assessment from Kela.

Even if bank security teams have not yet spotted OpenClaw on their specific networks, the broader trend of “shadow AI” — the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence tools by employees — plagues the financial services industry.

Nearly two-thirds, or 65%, of 1,500 surveyed financial services professionals in the U.K., France and Germany said employees use unapproved AI tools to communicate with customers, according to an October report from language AI company DeepL.

The finding is corroborated by a September survey by Cybernews, which indicated nearly 60% of surveyed U.S. employees (across industries) use unapproved AI tools at work, and 75% of those users share potentially sensitive data with the tools.

From: OpenClaw AI creates shadow IT risks for banks | American Banker.

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Nevada DMV says a lot of high-end vehicles are stolen because dealerships and individual customers don’t properly check the paperwork or identity of the person who shows up to transport them.

From: The curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis | MIT Technology Review.

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The explosion of vehicle transport fraud follows a pattern that has played out across the economy over the past roughly two decades: A business that once ran on phones, faxes, and personal relationships shifted to online marketplaces that increased efficiency and brought down costs—but the reduction in human-to-human interaction introduced security vulnerabilities that allowed organized and often international fraudsters to enter the industry.

From: The curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis | MIT Technology Review.

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Zahr had unwittingly been caught up in a new and growing type of organized criminal enterprise: vehicle transport fraud and theft. Crooks use email phishing, fraudulent paperwork, and other tactics to impersonate legitimate transport companies and get hired to deliver a luxury vehicle. They divert the shipment away from its intended destination and then use a mix of technology, computer skills, and old-school chop-shop techniques to erase traces of the vehicle’s original ownership and registration

From: The curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis | MIT Technology Review.

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At least half of spam email is now generated using LLMs, according to estimates by researchers at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and Barracuda Networks, who analyzed nearly 500,000 malicious messages collected before and after the launch of ChatGPT. They also found evidence that AI is increasingly being deployed in more sophisticated schemes. They looked at targeted email attacks, which impersonate a trusted figure in order to trick a worker within an organization out of funds or sensitive information. By April 2025, they found, at least 14% of those sorts of focused email attacks were generated using LLMs, up from 7.6% in April 2024.

From: AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse. | MIT Technology Review.

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Zambia has introduced a new mining tax payment option that allows taxes to be settled in China’s yuan, also known as the renminbi, making it the first African country to accept the currency for this core state revenue stream. The policy links tax administration more directly to the payment realities of the mining sector, where copper sales into the Chinese market have become central to both export earnings and the flow of foreign currency into the economy.

From: Zambia : Zambia Opens Mining Tax Payments to the Yuan in Africa First.

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We have identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models. These labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts, in violation of our terms of service and regional access restrictions.

From: Detecting and preventing distillation attacks \ Anthropic.

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