AI News Brief for Thursday, April 23, 2026
AI Scammers on the Rise and Improving. How to Fight Back.
This is the single most urgent AI story for older adults.The White House Has a Plan for AI. What It Actually Says.
The framework's protections against unauthorized AI use of voice and likeness directly address deepfake risks. Federal preemption of state laws could simplify or weaken consumer protections depending on implementation.
AI Scammers on the Rise and Improving. How to Fight Back.
You get a call. It's your granddaughter's voice. She's panicked, crying, saying she's been in an accident and needs money wired immediately. You recognize the voice. You act fast because that's what you do for people you love. Except it wasn't her.
It was an AI that had cloned her voice from a few seconds of audio scraped from her social media.
This scenario is no longer hypothetical. A new analysis published in the Journal of Accountancy finds that elder fraud losses rose 43% in 2024, reaching $4.89 billion. Deloitte projects that AI-generated fraud could hit $40 billion in damages by 2027. The technology behind these scams — voice cloning, deepfake videos, hyper-personalized phishing emails — is now accessible enough that criminals can run them at scale, targeting people based on data about their online behavior.
What makes these scams unusually dangerous is how plausible they've become. AI can generate a convincing impersonation of a family member, a Medicare official, or a bank representative. The emails arrive without typos. The videos look real. The voice on the phone sounds exactly right.
There are practical steps worth taking now. Here are a few:
Establish a family "safe word" — a code phrase only your closest people know, used to verify identity in an emergency call.
Be skeptical of any urgent money request, even from a familiar voice. If you get that call, hang up and dial back on a number you know.
Check your social media privacy settings to limit who can access your voice recordings or images.
Protecting yourself here isn't about being suspicious of everyone. Rather, it's about knowing that the scams have gotten better. Your defenses should too.
Have you or anyone you know received a suspicious call that turned out to be a scam? Or one you're still not sure about? We'd like to hear what that experience was like.
https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2026/apr/elder-fraud-rises-as-scammers-use-ai/
The White House Has a Plan for AI. What It Actually Says.
If you've felt like the rules around AI have been hard to follow, that's not a personal failing. Who's in charge? What's actually protected? Which law applies — state or federal? It has genuinely been a patchwork, with dozens of states writing their own frameworks and federal guidance largely absent. But that's starting to shift.
In March, the White House released its National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, a set of legislative recommendations to guide how Congress shapes federal AI law. Analysis from consumer law experts at Consumer Finance Monitor breaks down what's in it.
A few things in the framework are directly relevant to older adults. On the protection side, the administration recommends that Congress establish rights against the unauthorized use of a person's voice or likeness in AI-generated content — the kind of deepfake impersonation that's increasingly fueling elder fraud scams. That's a meaningful consumer protection if it becomes law.
On the preemption side, the framework recommends limiting the patchwork of state AI laws, aiming for a single national standard. The intent is consistency. The concern, noted by legal analysts reviewing the framework, is that it could weaken some of the stronger consumer protections that states like California and Colorado have already put in place. The outcome depends heavily on how Congress writes the actual legislation.
Worth knowing: the framework is a recommendation, not a law. Nothing here takes effect until Congress acts, and the details will matter enormously.
As AI rules evolve at both state and federal levels, staying informed is its own form of protection. The framework is a signal of direction, even if the destination isn't fixed yet.
Here at neoClarity we'll keep a close eye on developments and share updates as they become available.
Are you paying attention to how AI is being regulated? Does it feel too difficult to know what matters?