Sardine has unveiled Sardine AI Labs, a dedicated applied research unit, alongside $375,000 in research fellowships aimed at pushing frontier AI into fraud and financial crime prevention.

The new lab will examine how AI models can interpret financial behaviour as a form of language, predict emerging attack methods and support risk teams in reaching sounder decisions.

As part of the launch, Sardine has invited applications for as many as five fellowships, which will go to independent researchers able to build on the lab’s initial findings.

Sardine argues that the next breakthroughs in foundation models will emerge from specialist AI neolabs that hold proprietary, real-world data. Fraud prevention illustrates the point, as even prominent academics frequently struggle to obtain datasets large enough to move the discipline forward.

The company views payment and account access activity as carrying recognisable patterns, with transaction records, devices and IP addresses combining into behavioural profiles that foundation models can examine to spot irregularities and flag possible fraud.

Financial crime prevention continues to weigh heavily on financial institutions, pushing up processing costs across card, ACH and wire payments. Sanctions screening is one persistent pain point: individuals whose names or identities resemble entries on sanctions lists can be wrongly flagged, leaving their onboarding stalled for weeks during manual checks.

Establishing whether two records belong to the same person remains difficult. Spotting money laundering, terrorist financing and drug-related payments among billions of bank transactions is another, with current tools often holding up genuine payments through false positives while missing illicit flows, leaving institutions open to serious regulatory and financial penalties.

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