Congress Takes Aim at Dirty Money in the Multi-Billion-Dollar U.S. Art Market
July 23, 2025
Bipartisan Legislation Would Strengthen National Security, Uphold Economic Integrity, and Support Honest Businesses
The Antiquities Coalition commends Senators John Fetterman (D-PA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Dave McCormick (R-PA), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and Andy Kim (D-NJ) for introducing the Art Market Integrity Act, a commonsense proposal to apply anti-money laundering (AML) safeguards to high-risk art transactions. For years, criminals have exploited the art market’s regulatory gaps to move and hide illicit funds, finance armed conflict and terrorism, and evade U.S. sanctions. This bipartisan bill fights back through the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA)—a key tool for detecting and preventing financial crime—in recognition of the American art market’s global significance and its growing role in the domestic economy.
Art is increasingly bought and sold as a financial asset, yet it isn’t protected as such under U.S. law. The $25B American art market, the largest in the world, has remained out of reach of the BSA—which now covers every industry of comparable risk and scale. Extending the BSA to art will provide much-needed consumer protections, helping to prevent fraud, promote transparency, and otherwise ensure that collectors, dealers, museums, and investors can participate in the market with greater confidence.
Art’s high-value, low-oversight combination has proved to be an ideal environment for a wide range of criminal activity: in recent years, U.S. prosecutors have charged Hezbollah’s top financier with laundering $160M+ through art and luxury goods; a bipartisan Senate investigation warned close Kremlin allies bypassed sanctions through $18M+ in art sales; and investigative journalists have uncovered how Latin American drug cartels trafficked looted antiquities to launder illicit profits.
In the sponsors’ official release, Deborah Lehr, Chair and Founder of the Antiquities Coalition, called the Art Market Integrity Act “a smart, pragmatic, and long-overdue step to protect a multi-billion dollar industry from criminal abuse.” She noted that “right now, the United States is the last major art market without basic safeguards against money laundering, sanctions evasion, and terrorist financing,” which “puts our legitimate businesses at risk while others, including the U.K., EU, Switzerland, and even China, have already acted.” Lehr emphasized that “aligning with these global standards should not be burdensome—many U.S. dealers already comply with them abroad—but it will help preserve the integrity of the market here at home and keep the U.S. a competitive and trusted leader in the global art and antiquities trade.”
Reflecting this practical approach, the bill only covers the most vulnerable participants in the art market: businesses engaged in transactions over $10,000 or $50,000 annually, mirroring thresholds already in place in Europe.
The Antiquities Coalition has long advocated for targeted reforms to prevent the exploitation of art and antiquities by criminal networks. In 2021, Congress took a critical first step by extending the BSA to the antiquities trade, but left high-value art transactions unaddressed. The Art Market Integrity Act would level this playing field. It would also fulfill the lead recommendation of a landmark 2020 report by the Antiquities Coalition’s Financial Crimes Task Force, a first-of-its-kind initiative that brought together leaders from the art, financial, and legal community, as well as former law enforcement and government officials.
Given these important goals, this legislation has already earned support from a broad and growing coalition of national security, law enforcement, and transparency advocates, including Transparency International U.S., the FACT Coalition, FDD Action, the American Jewish Committee, Razom for Ukraine, American Coalition for Ukraine, the Initiative for the Recovery of Venezuelan Assets (INRAV), the National Border Patrol Council, and the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA).
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