The FTC continues its focus and concern on use of technologies that integrate artificial intelligence, this time turning to potential consumer harm with voice cloning technology. Today the commission announced a challenge looking for solutions to help monitor and prevent malicious voice cloning. In the announcement, the FTC pointed to current scams where threat actors use cloned voices -created using AI tools- to conduct scams. For example, money requests from a person’s “relative.” The winner will receive a $25,000 prize, and entries will be accepted in the first weeks of January.

Putting It Into Practice: The FTC has used challenges in the past for issues that are of particular concern within the agency, including one in 2017 to address security vulnerability for IoT devices. We expect to see continued focus on AI from the FTC (and others), as this challenge and its enforcement actions demonstrate.