Blog Post

Agentic AML: How AI Agents Are Transforming Anti Money Laundering Compliance in the GENIUS Act Era

January 23, 2026

Note: This article was derived from our CEO Victor Fang's presentation at UC Berkeley, in Aug 2025.

The global fight against the $2 Trillion money laundering problem is entering a new phase. As cryptocurrency adoption accelerates, stablecoin market capitalization reaches record highs, and regulators sharpen their focus, traditional Anti-Money Laundering (AML) workflows are straining under the weight of scale, cost, and complexity.

At the Decentralized AI Summit at UC Berkeley, AnChain.AI outlined a new approach: Agentic AML (Anti Money Laundering) —a system of specialized AI agents designed to fundamentally reshape how financial institutions investigate, analyze, and report financial crime in the GENIUS Act era.

The Scale of the Problem

Money laundering is not a marginal issue—it is a systemic one. Per Financial Action Task Force (FATF), over $2 trillion is laundered globally each year, while financial institutions spend approximately $61 billion annually on AML compliance. Despite this massive investment, enforcement fines reached $24 billion in 2024 alone.

Operationally, the burden is severe:

Institutions process 100,000+ AML alerts per year.
Each alert costs $30–$70 to review.
End-to-end investigations can take days, often involving fragmented tools and manual handoffs.

At the same time, crypto-native risks are exploding. Stablecoins alone have reached a $240 billion market cap, amplifying both legitimate use cases and illicit activity across payments, DeFi, and cross-border flows.

From Crypto Investigation to Agentic AML

AnChain.AI’s journey began in cryptocurrency investigation—long before “agentic AI” became a buzzword. Its platform has supported investigations across 40 blockchains, screened 74 million transactions per day, analyzed 61 million smart contracts, and underpinned more than $870 million in seizures and recoveries worldwide, including high-profile cases involving the IRS, DOJ, and FinCEN. One notable example is the $65 million KyberSwap DeFi hack, announced by the U.S. Department of Justice in February 2025. AnChain.AI’s smart-contract and transaction-tracing capabilities played a key role in tracking illicit flows, including $14 million in stablecoins. These crypto investigations exposed a broader truth: the same AI techniques used to trace blockchain crime could transform traditional AML workflows.

Why Legacy AML Workflows Break

Traditional AML processes are linear, manual, and slow. Intelligence gathering, investigation, and regulatory reporting areften treated as separate stages—each with its own tools, queues, and delays. Benchmarking data from 2025 AML projects shows that legacy workflows commonly require:

16 hours for intelligence gathering.
24 hours for investigation.
8 hours for reporting.

That’s nearly two full days per case, multiplied across tens or hundreds of thousands of alerts per year.

Enter Agentic AML:

Agentic AML replaces monolithic workflows with a coordinated system of AI agents, each designed for a specific compliance task—while keeping humans firmly in the loop.

The Three Core Agents

Intelligence Agent
- Performs sanctions screening, crypto intelligence checks, IP analysis, and compliance knowledge lookups.
- Powered by LLMs using a ReAct (Reason + Act) framework and an AML-specific MCP server.
- Delivers up to 5× productivity gains in early-stage analysis.
Investigation Agent
- Automatically traces funds forward and backward across wallets, smart contracts, and blockchains.
- Built on graph infrastructure scaled to trillions of transactions.
- Achieves 6× productivity improvements in investigative work.
Reporting Agent
- Generates regulator-ready reports with full transaction forensics.
- Designed for human review before submission to Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) such as FinCEN.
- Delivers up to 8× productivity gains in reporting.

Together, these agents reduce end-to-end AML case time by approximately 6× compared to legacy workflows.

Human-in-the-Loop Is Critical For LLM Hallucination

One of the most important messages from the presentation is also the most grounded: AI hallucination is real—and dangerous in compliance contexts.

In AML, hallucinations aren’t amusing—they can lead to false positives, missed risks, or regulatory exposure. Agentic AML explicitly embeds human review at every critical stage, ensuring:

AI augments analysts rather than replaces them.
Outputs remain explainable and auditable.
Regulatory trust is preserved.

The Infrastructure Behind Agentic AML

Agentic AML is not just a model—it’s a vertical SaaS stack purpose-built for financial crime:

Agentic layer: Crypto intel, smart-contract analysis, auto-tracing, sanctions screening, and reporting agents.
AI layer: Fine-tuned LLMs, local models, RAG pipelines, and over 16 ML models.
Data layer: Blockchains, VASP data, smart-contract knowledge bases, sanctions databases, and compliance documents.
Infrastructure: Deployed across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and optimized for GPUs ranging from cost-efficient T4s to high-end H100s.

This architecture allows institutions to balance performance, cost, and regulatory requirements.

The Cost Reality of AI Agents

AI agents are powerful—but not free. Production deployments require careful design to avoid replacing human inefficiency with machine inefficiency.

The takeaway is clear: agentic AI must be purpose-built, cost-aware, and selectively deployed—not treated as a generic automation layer.

Why the GENIUS Act Changes Everything

President Trump signs the GENIUS Act into law

As stablecoins and crypto payments move closer to the regulatory core of the financial system, the GENIUS Act is expected to dramatically increase compliance expectations for fintechs, payment companies, and financial institutions (CNBC)

The scale regulators are reacting to

$8 trillion+ in stablecoin settlement volume annually, already rivaling major global payment networks
100M+ stablecoin transactions per month across public blockchains
$150B+ in stablecoin market capitalization, concentrated in payment and treasury use cases
24/7, cross-border flows with no clearing window and no geographic boundaries

What the GENIUS Act changes

From periodic to continuous oversight: Stablecoin activity now demands always-on monitoring, not batch reviews
Bank-grade controls: Expectations align with traditional payment rails—sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, and auditability by default
Real-time response: At current volumes, even a 0.1% false-positive rate can overwhelm compliance teams
Explainability at scale: Regulators expect clear, defensible reasoning behind alerts, not opaque scores

This creates a perfect storm:

More transaction volume moving at internet speed
Higher regulatory scrutiny as stablecoins underpin real payments
Greater demand for real-time, explainable AML without linear headcount growth

Agentic AML is built for the GENIUS Act era—connecting data, AI, and human judgment into a single compliance fabric. It enables institutions to:

Monitor millions of stablecoin transactions daily across multiple chains
Adapt dynamically as new risks and typologies emerge
Convert raw blockchain data into actionable, regulator-ready intelligence

As stablecoins become core financial infrastructure, compliance must scale faster than volume. Agentic AML delivers that leverage—turning regulatory pressure into operational advantage.

Final Thoughts

Agentic AML is not about replacing compliance teams. It’s about giving them leverage—turning days into hours, noise into intelligence, and static workflows into adaptive systems. As financial crime grows more sophisticated, the tools used to fight it must evolve just as quickly. Agentic AML represents a meaningful step toward that future.

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