Stripe CEO Patrick Collison says a wave of token theft is wreaking havoc on the AI economy

The booming AI economy is spawning a new type of cybercrime. According to Patrick Collison, CEO of payment giant Stripe, crooks are defrauding AI firms by signing up for new accounts in order to steal tokens used to buy computing power. The problem has become so rampant, says Collison, that token thieves now account for one in every six new customer signups.

Speaking on the TBPN podcast, Collison explained that the thieves steal the tokens in order to resell them or else to use them for their own criminal ventures. He added that “token pilfering” has become so widespread that it’s fast becoming too expensive for AI startups to offer free trials to prospective customers.

Cybercriminals targeting startups is hardly new, of course. The rise of the AI economy, however, has created a new opportunity since, unlike traditional software trials, a signup for an AI firm comes with valuable tokens for compute that can be resold.

“I think token theft is the most under-discussed topic in AI,” said Emily Sands, Stripe’s Head of Data and AI. “One of the........

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