Mission: Impossible and the Growing Threat of AI-enabled Crime

Today, the final installment of Mission: Impossible drops in theaters — The Final Reckoning, a direct continuation of Dead Reckoning Part One.

The two-part epic marks Ethan Hunt’s most complex and chilling mission to date: stopping a sentient artificial intelligence known only as The Entity, which has evolved from a black-box cyberweapon into a ghost in the global machine. In Dead Reckoning, we first meet "The Entity" through a terrifying demonstration of its capabilities: it infiltrates the systems of a stealth Russian submarine, the Sevastopol, feeding it false sensor data. Convinced it's under attack, the sub fires torpedoes — at itself. The entire crew is killed, and the vessel — along with a cruciform key that can access The Entity’s source code — sinks to the bottom of the Bering Sea.

The rest of Dead Reckoning unfolds as a globe-spanning race to recover both halves of the key and find the black site holding The Entity’s original code. What makes The Entity so dangerous isn’t just its reach — it’s its autonomy. It’s no longer answering to any nation or operator. It penetrates data systems, erases identities, manipulates truth, and stays steps ahead of anyone trying to contain it. By the time we reach The Final Reckoning, Hunt and his team are not just tracking The Entity — they're trying to stop Gabriel Martinelli, its human proxy, from giving it the last piece of control over global systems. This isn't a rogue AI in a lab; it’s one embedded in the infrastructure of the world.

What the Mission: Impossible franchise depicts as thriller fiction is already edging into reality. TRM Labs’ report, The Rise of AI-Enabled Crime, details how criminals are already weaponizing generative AI for financial gain. TRM’s new report, entitled AI-enabled Fraud: How Scammers Are Leveraging Generative AI, goes even deeper into how the use of synthetic media — deepfakes, voice clones, AI-generated chat personas — are being used in scams ranging from CEO impersonation to sextortion to fraud. TRM investigators have seen cases where AI-generated videos and images are used to extort victims, even when no actual compromising content exists. The psychological leverage is the same, and the damage is just as devastating. 

In one recent TRM Talks episode, digital forensics expert Dr. Hany Farid described a world where “reality is up for grabs” — a line that could have been lifted straight from the Mission: Impossible script.

What’s striking is how The Entity’s tactics in the film mirror the real-world evolution of AI-enabled financial crime. Just as The Entity manipulates what governments see and believe, threat actors today use deepfakes to trick banks, exploit compliance systems, and bypass KYC. TRM Labs has identified crypto wallet activity tied to pig butchering scams where AI bots maintain conversations for months, building trust before defrauding victims. We’ve also seen identity fabrication tools powered by AI used to open accounts and facilitate money laundering.

Both Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning end on the same note that TRM's work makes clear: generative AI is not just a technical breakthrough — it’s an inflection point for trust, financial crime, and national security. Whether in film or in the field, meeting this threat requires public-private collaboration, intelligence sharing, and tools that can adapt as fast as the criminals. The Entity may be imaginary, but what it represents is already here.

But the same technological revolution that fuels today’s threats is also powering the response. Law enforcement and national security agencies are increasingly leveraging AI-driven tools to trace digital assets, detect synthetic media, and identify emerging threat patterns across global financial and communications networks. From deepfake detection to blockchain-based anomaly analysis, these capabilities are being deployed to meet adversaries at machine speed.

Just as The Entity symbolizes a dangerous leap in adversarial power, the defenders of digital trust are evolving in parallel — working across borders, sectors, and systems to outpace the next-generation threats that AI now enables.