FINANCIAL GEOPOLITICS SEPTEMBER 2026: Disposable agents – AI anarchy – Houthi disruption

Hello, people. September was an Indian summer in London, and a very busy one at that – we had to focus on the news we thought was the most interesting or most overlooked, because there was a deluge of financial-geopolitical events, and even the Chungus isn’t that big. We have original reporting on hostile state use of crypto to hire “disposable agents,” AI regulation and geopolitics, and more.

THE BROAD VIEW WITH OMRI BRINNER

Cases have been fast proliferating across the West of criminals hired by hostile states via chat apps and paid in cryptocurrencies, for one-off or semi-regular terrorism, sabotage, hate crime and other subversive shenanigans by so-called “disposable agents”. Omri Brinner is an experienced researcher of terrorism funding, who said his work has this month been picked up by a British national security agency tracking have-a-go foreign agents. He gave our newsletter an exclusive interview about trends in the “gig economy” of spies and saboteurs paid for in cryptocurrency – and what the good guys can do to regain control. Brinner told Financial Geopolitics that he spent seven years researching and combatting terrorism finance in the private sector as well as in collaboration with law enforcement, two years of which he focused on crypto. 

“I would say that in the context of countering the financing of such operations the most important element to improve is cooperation between the private and public sectors and across the sectors. If an LEA [law enforcement agency] knows about a certain crypto address that belongs to the hostile intelligence agency it would be extremely beneficial if they could share that address with blockchain analytics companies. These will label them and other linked addresses, notifying crypto exchanges on the risk associated with these crypto addresses and providing LEAs with other linked addresses, that can lead to arrests of recruited agents the LEAs weren’t aware of,” he said.

Our editorial policy is to call it cyberpunk, but officials refer to it as a new branch of hybrid warfare. “Hostile states’ intelligence agencies approach and recruit ordinary citizens, expats and criminals in target countries to commit crimes on their behalf,” said Brinner. “Their logic is that they have plausible deniability of any involvement if the subject gets caught. Using cryptoassets sits well with this reasoning, as no one can put a name to an unhosted crypto address. That being said, the visibility of the blockchain does allow investigators to understand the flow of funds and linked crypto addresses.”

How hard was it to catch one? “It was part of a painstaking investigation. In 99% of the cases one reports on, one doesn’t hear about the result of their investigation. I can’t share too much about the pattern or the actors involved, but I can say that this specific case included cooperation between the private-private and private-public sectors, which you would think is a given, but it isn’t. That’s a key element for successful counter terror financing. No entity or sector can do it all alone. There has to be more cooperation.”

The old saying, that in a big city you’re never more than a few metres from a rat, applies to the new breed of saboteur-spies Iran and Russia are cultivating, Brinner said. “It will keep happening, and so will the payments in cryptoassets. But it doesn’t mean LEAs shouldn’t look to counter this threat. We’ve seen reports about espionage, terrorism, sabotage, assassinations and more. The plausible deniability element I mentioned earlier is part of it, but countries like Russia and Iran also take pride in the fact that they can infiltrate foreign societies and inflict damage in target countries through local populations. If you think about it, when you walk down the street in central London, anyone there can be someone who is being handled by a hostile country to inflict damage and is being paid in cryptoassets. It makes you wonder how safe you and your society truly are.”

TOP LINES

1. AI ANARCHY: It was an intense month for AI, with a proposal by the head of Anthropic to regulate frontier models generating extraordinary debate, ranging from political support of the demand for regulation to more cynical suggestions that Anthropic was seeking a way to capture the whole market or become quasi-nationalised, or that it was effectively blackmailing countries with the proposal, rolled out at a time when AI stocks were beginning to show signs of creaking and Anthropic itself reportedly began investing in cutting-edge biolabs, with the memory of COVID still raw. Our (non-financial, non-binding) partners at the Geopolitical Insight and Education Foundation have fielded ace analyst Andre Franco to give our readers his exclusive view of this controversy, and importantly, what it all means for Europe. TL;DR: nothing good.

“When the White House ordered an export-control order on Claude Fable 5 last June, Europeans were taken by surprise. The debate quickly turned to its consequences: how to regulate models, how to obtain a certain level of AI sovereignty, what to do in the case model access is weaponised, not only by Washington, but also by Beijing. 

“What nobody talked about, however, was the fact that the level of dependency that the EU now has in relation, not only to the US but also to its Chinese counterparts, has been brewing for a long time, inside the financial system.

“American AI is financed by the deepest equity and bond markets in the world. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft expected to spend close to $700 billion combined on capital expenditure in 2026, largely on AI build-outs. China finances the same race through the state: its national AI industry fund was capitalised at 60 billion yuan through the Big Fund III semiconductor vehicle. The former is based on market valuations, while the other relies on centralised and subsidised state capital. Both can absorb heavy losses. 

“The gloomy reality is that Europe has none of those two. Around 70% of EU corporate financing comes from bank loans, against roughly 77% from capital markets in the US. EU households save about €1.4 trillion a year against €800 billion in the US, yet around €300 billion flows annually into non-EU markets, with a huge chunk ending in the NASDAQ, and S&P500. Part of Europe’s savings, in other words, underwrites the valuations that fund the American AI boom that now plays against us.

“The Centre for Economic Policy Research argues the real problem is not capital flight but insufficient allocation to equities, since most European savings sit in domestic bank deposits with a strong home bias. The lack of a true banking union, with major banks which pale in comparison with the main American ones and a culture of risk aversion compound this effect.

“It’s time to be realistic. Europe needs practical, sensible solutions. It will not out-finance Silicon Valley or Beijing at the frontier. It does not need to. The fallback models with open-weight deployment on institutional servers and independent evaluation, is capex-light by comparison but it stays not far behind. A Savings and Investments Union that allocates even a fraction of idle deposits to these would buy more sovereignty per euro than any potential gigafactory built to run on NVIDIA chips,” wrote Franco.

2. TEHRAN TURNING? By the way of AI, in Yemen, jihadi Houthi rebels high on Khat, have staged a successful battle against Saudi-backed forces, and disrupted Riyadh’s oil supply, causing market panic and broader concerns about freedom of navigation in the Bab El Mandeb strait. However, the glory of the terrorism-loving tribesmen may be short -lived. Saudi briefed this week that it managed to restore oil supplies and regain the initiative in the conflict. Still, the uprising of the Houthis was remarkable in many ways, not least for reportedly using Western AI models to develop guided missiles, and reportedly creating deep fake videos of Saudi generals to sow confusion and division among their opponents, in another win for our theory that the era of cyberpunk is here. We are indulging in a contrarian stance on this one and will be happy to admit we were wrong in the next issue if need be. While bond yields haven’t settled and commodity markets remain inflated over the conflict in Iran there may – repeat, MAY – be light at the end of the tunnel, as the US strategy to break down the regime seems to be turning a corner.

Ben Shapiro, a conservative media figure in the US, who has also criticised Trump on a number of occasions over allegations of corruption and other issues, posted a video explainer that suggested the blockade may be yielding results. Indeed, independent media outlets and experts have confirmed some of these, such as hyperinflation, an inability to export oil thanks to the blockade, a partial reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and growing fractures inside the Iranian power elite due to continued targeted attacks by Israel and, presumably, US special forces operating inside the country. Edward Luttwak, one of the world’s foremost strategists, who also generously gave us an interview for our inaugural newsletter this April, posted on X that  the “US has a winning strategy” on Iran. We reserve judgment but it won’t hurt the West for the regime to buckle sooner rather than later. 

3. RUSSIAN REBOUND? Helped partially by Ukraine, which is having to explain awkwardly to its European partners why it has an unexpected budget shortfall of $27 billion, Vladimir Putin, of all people, has had a good September. With the fake elections out of the way, he is now free, and some say, willing to call a mobilisation for the replenishment of his invading army. Top-level Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Alisher Usmanov have been let off the EU sanctions list in a dirty backroom deal involving France, Ireland and Azerbaijan, with Paris citing national security imperatives as its motivation. Needless to say EU leaders have disgraced themselves in the eyes of every supporter of Ukraine and of the very idea of Western moral superiority, especially as the same people who carried out this manoeuvre would never miss an opportunity to lecture Donald Trump and the US for their supposed pro-Russian attitudes. Usmanov and Fridman remain, for the time being, sanctioned stateside, but plenty of good news came Putin’s way from there as well in recent weeks, as it was revealed that Donald Trump Junior’s wedding party was paid for by a Russian securocrat. Three weeks before the Fridman-Usmanov coup de theatre, a spokeswoman for Roger Gherson, a London lawyer who is known for defending, inter alia, Russian oligarchs and at least one warlord from media criticism, got in touch with a pithy quote: “The UK and European sanctions regimes have failed to stop the war to date. The support of the UK Supreme Court and the European Court for the sanctioning of individuals has largely side-stepped many of the protections implemented in the treaties created after the Second World War and deprived individuals sanctioned of some of their most basic rights. Serious criminals are afforded more protection in these systems than sanctioned individuals or their families. A very dangerous precedent has been set.” Won’t someone think of the oligarchs? Obviously the European Union got Gherson’s message – we, having received his official letters on behalf of his ultra-rich Russian clients on more than one occasion over the years, cannot help being somewhat bewildered.

Amid all the excitement it may have been overlooked that Russia also launched its own Central Bank Digital Currency, the digital ruble, while the prototype of it, if we can call it that, the pirate-cryptocurrency A7A5 under the tutelage of oligarch Ilan Shor, has been making international news – a year after we started revealing its inner mechanics. The Financial Times came out with two cracking exclusives showing A7 was more than just a crypto business – it exploited well-known loopholes in traditional banking to move billions undetected through Western institutions, and used the proceeds of Russian oil giant Rosneft to keep the wheels turning. For its part, the New York Times also ran a detailed exposé revealing that A7 was using Western AI models to generate software and fake paperwork that helped it avoid Western sanctions. Earlier, the UK National Crime Agency issued a communique warning about A7’s methods. One of the foremost experts to emerge on this topic is Zach Tvarozna, who was quoted in the FT and NYT coverage and has been in touch with this newsletter too – we highly recommend his Substack. We do need as much factual reporting on Russia as we can get, because the so-called experts favoured by Moscow in the West are low on information – for example, John Mearsheimer, who has long taken a pro-Russian stance on global affairs, recently visited Sankt Petersburg and by his own account was penniless, because he didn’t realise his US credit cards wouldn’t work there.

4. SHORT SHRIFT: A US-based short seller published an incendiary report into Raiffeisen Bank International, one of Austria’s largest banks and a holdout of the Western system in Russia, alleging serious sanctions violations and other wrongdoing – which the firm denied. Shares remain 70% up over the last six months.

5. CANADA CONFLICT: The political rift between the US and Canada seems to be moving into the banking world, where President Trump has warned Ottawa was being overly restrictive on US banking competition in Canada while also having most of its top firms present in the US market. But the issues go deeper, with investigative reporters long since showing Canada was lax on policing dirty money, cartels and gangs, which is a strategic weakness for the whole West. For example, this month it was discovered that the TGR network, a sanctioned Russian money laundering group with links to the Kremlin and organised crime globally – known in the UK from the “operation Destabilise” carried out against it – has strong Canadian links.

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6. GOLD BUGS: The Dutch central bank moved major gold reserves from New York and Canada to London. The reasons can only be speculated upon, but outside both the EU and the US, the Bank of England showed strength and proved its independence by selling government bonds at a time when it disadvantaged the government, which is more than can be said for the ECB. In the event, as market pressure mounted, the Bank paused its quantitative tightening operation, giving the government some respite. However, the temporary stance seems to have been enough to convince partners around the world that amid growing instability, the Gray Lady of Threadneedle street can remain credible.

7. NETHERLANDS NARCOS: Drugs cartels are becoming a serious threat to the statehood of European countries. Lost in the month’s noise was a grim episode from the Netherlands whereby armed drugs gangs opened automatic rifle fire in public, over the confiscation of a large shipment of cocaine. Mexico-style videos were published threatening officials and rival groups, and the police made 34 arrests.

8. WIN SOME LOSE SOME: Online casinos, especially in conjunction with cryptocurrency, are a nightmare for money laundering risk and dodgy marketing tactics enabling illegal gambling. We at reporter.london have been following the excesses of this industry, and in the the latest move on the sector, the Financial Action Task Force, an international forum against dirty money, issued a detailed assessment of the threat posed from the point of view of money laundering, sanctions evasion and terrorism finance – well worth a read by anyone with a passing interest in the subject. Coincidentally, this month also saw a data leak out of Curacao, exposing the secrets of the global online casino industry which has made a home there thanks to its permissive (ie barely existing) regulations.

9. CHINATOWN: By the way, our dear friends at ICIJ brought out a mammoth series of stories focusing on some less-than-above-board moves at the London branch of the world’s biggest bank by assets: the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). Based on millions of internal files, journalists showed that when geopolitically used, the financial institution dodged rules and norms and lent money against the best interests of the bank in order to advance the agenda of its home government. “China Capital” (ICIJ does have a knack for these names) contains firm denials of wrongdoing by ICBC itself.

10. STATECRAFT ENTREPRENEURS: The Times has an eye-catching story profiling a business intelligence company in London that focuses on “economic statecraft” – namely, investigating for secret links to foreign governments, countering industrial espionage and combing through supply chains to find potential exposure to sanctions or vulnerabilities to hostile states. Privateering is a necessary component of the growing geopolitical chaos, after all. With talk recently of “letters of marque” being issued by the White House, we can only marvel at the fact that the cyberpunk world we have been prophesying is coming into being faster than expected.

Alright, that’s it. Thanks as always for reading, and all the best until next payday.

Special thanks to BM who edited.

Any comments or errors? email matei@reporter.london.

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