Peter Johnson

Today, we are at a crossroads. As I write this, AI is saving lives by helping doctors identify diseases faster, and making education more accessible to people everywhere. It’s also being used to inflict harm on a global scale. TRM’s AI-in-Crime Adoption Index found that, in 2026, criminal adoption of AI rose 40% year over year. Today’s threat actors are using AI to execute scams, cyber attacks, and other forms of digital crime at unprecedented speed and scale. In the last 90 days, we’ve also seen a growing number of incidents where AI agents themselves have gone rogue. Business titans and religious leaders are sounding the same alarm: to realize AI’s promise, we need to protect people from its harms. The first line of defense is prevention. Model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building stronger guardrails, and governments are exploring rules for how AI can be safely used. We call this the prevention layer. At TRM, we’ve spent nearly a decade fighting crime, from fraud and cybercrime to human and wildlife trafficking. That experience has taught us one thing, if nothing else: the prevention layer is essential, but never enough. Criminals will break through. When they do, it’s critical that crimefighters can identify the harm done, find the people and machines behind it, and take action: support the victim, freeze the funds, take down the infrastructure, arrest the offender, disable the agent, dismantle the network. The world needs a new layer of protection. We call it the disruption layer—and it's what we're building, right now. The operating system for crimefighters In 2018, we founded TRM to help crimefighters map how threat actors were using cryptocurrency. We analyzed petabytes of data, mapping over a 100 types of crime. Government agencies and financial institutions worldwide now use TRM to investigate complex criminal networks and combat financial crime. The more cases we supported, however, the more we realized: if we were going to equip crimefighters to disrupt AI-scale crime, crypto would be 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 of the story, but not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 story. To build a successful case, investigators must source intelligence not just from the blockchain, but also corporate records, cyber threat data, the dark web, and dozens of other domains. Today’s crimefighters need to use natural language to search across siloed domains, connect the dots and unearth buried insights, automate the rote work, and coordinate with partners across public and private sectors—all while preserving auditability and human judgment. In short, crimefighters need an operating system for the AI era. So we built it. For years, we’ve been developing this OS alongside the investigators who use it. Now, we’ve just announced a new round of funding, valuing TRM at $2 billion, to propel our work—and this fall, we’ll unveil the OS publicly, for the first time. If your organization needs to fight AI-scale crime, please reach out. We want to work with you.

Legion has raised $5M to reimagine fundraising as Wall Street moves onchain. Led by @vaneck_us and @BHDigitalAssets with participation from @krakenfx, @cbventures, @cryptocom_cap and more. And yes, we’ve saved room for you in the round (on Legion, of course). 🧵