As I See It: Artificial Integrity
December 1, 2025 Victor Rozek
I don’t remember it being taught in school. Through high school and college I cannot recall a single instance where the concept of integrity was discussed or even mentioned. Occasionally I heard words like “honest” and “honorable” applied to virtuous historical figures. But those concepts describe behavior. Integrity, on the other hand, is based on character, on a commitment to consistently practice those virtues. Integrity drives behavior but it denotes more than action; it denotes essence, a state of being whole, and ethically unabridged.
Honor is about what you do; integrity is about who you are. Which is why a world run by AI is in deep trouble. The degree AI displays any modicum of integrity is based on data, not values. Data can be true or false; biased or objective; selective or inclusive. What conclusions a machine draws from data has nothing to do with character, because it has none.
At best it can assimilate vast amounts of information and do some devilishly clever things with it.
Case in point: the Peraire-Bueno brothers, James and Anton. Beneficiaries of a privileged education at MIT, and only in their 20s, they devised a clever scheme that netted them $25 million in crypto currency, and potentially up to 60 years in prison.
The whole stratagem took no more than 12 seconds to execute although prosecutors claim the brothers had been plotting the transaction for months, training their bot to manipulate the protocols used to authenticate legitimate crypto transactions. To prove nefarious intention, prosecutors noted some curious online searches such as “how to wash crypto” and “top crypto lawyers,” and “money laundering statute of limitations.”
Ultimately, they were charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. Each of these three charges carries a potential maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
The brothers presented a novel defense. Their attorney argued that they merely outsmarted the bots responsible for managing the Ethereum blockchain. Defense lawyers told jurors that the brothers’ elaborate, outsmart-the-other-guy’s-bot maneuver was nothing more nefarious than a skillful trading strategy. It would be hard to argue that netting $25 million in 12 seconds would not qualify as a skillful trading strategy. Ethical, however, is another matter.
Prosecutors countered by saying that the crypto diversion only worked because the brothers made repeated misrepresentations creating a classic bait and switch. Their strategy allowed them to lure three unsuspecting traders, they said, because their bot was essentially programmed to lie.
The brothers argued that crypto is an unregulated market and, as such, their maneuvers broke no laws and should not be regulated after the fact. All they did, they claimed, was outsmart some automated trading bots.
And back and forth it went. For three weeks the jury was subjected to mind-numbing testimony, often technically complex, alternately damning and defending the slick move that padded the brothers’ cryptocurrency wallets.
Who to believe? In a sense it was bots versus brothers, except the bots couldn’t testify. After nearly three full days of deliberations, the jury announced that it was struggling to reach a verdict. The judge wasn’t wholly sympathetic and, reminding them of their oath, sent them back to the jury room on a late Friday afternoon armed with dinner menus to continue their deliberations.
The five men and seven women reportedly looked weary as they filed out of the courtroom, but in spite of working through dinner, they could not reach a verdict. US District Court Judge Jessica G. L. Clarke had little choice but to declare a mistrial. But the travails of the Peraire-Bueno brothers are not yet over. They are expected to be retried early next year.
The wording in the original 19-page indictment is both telling and cautionary. In part it accuses the brothers of “exploiting the very integrity of the Ethereum blockchain.” Except they couldn’t have done it without their bot. And that bot had no conscience at all.
Which speaks to the need for restriction and regulation. The prior administration sought to introduce both. But the current administration has lured massive contributions from tech giants with promises of neither.
Yet not everyone is convinced that laissez-faire is the best policy where AI is concerned. According to The Washington Post, “Republican officials from statehouses to Capitol Hill warn his [Trump’s] full-throated embrace of the tech industry’s artificial intelligence boom risks undermining Americans’ economic security and exposing their children to new harms.”
Meanwhile, the Tech Bros just keep shoveling money at purchasable officials determined to do exactly as they wish with no oversight whatsoever. But whether it originates from the government or the tech sector, supporting unrestricted AI may not serve the national interest.
For one thing, the United States is in fierce competition with China for AI supremacy. A competition with long-range impacts.
According to the Google bot, “The US has approved the sale of advanced AI chips, including Nvidia’s Blackwell-class chips, to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, allowing state-backed firms like Saudi’s Humain to purchase thousands of them. This decision comes after the US had previously restricted exports to prevent technology from reaching China…” This policy shift almost guarantees that it will reach China, given the middle east has strong ties to the Chinese.
The reality is, no matter how sophisticated AI becomes, it will never feel physical hunger, the pain of losing a loved one, or the joy of seeing a sunrise. It will not be troubled by its decisions. It will not celebrate triumphs or suffer consequences. The only integrity it can ever hope to achieve is that which is programmed into it. Since that process involves feeding the machine high-quality, relevant data, it is wholly dependent on those feeding it.
The Peraire-Bueno brothers chose how to train their bot – for their personal enrichment at the cost of others. The Tech Bros choose who they support with their dollars – for their personal enrichment regardless of the cost to the rest of us. The paucity of integrity is not reassuring.
All of human history can be summarized as people with integrity cleaning up the damage caused by those without it. Left to unintegrous hands, AI is shaping up to require the biggest cleanup of all.
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