Art Market Integrity Act - Summer 2025
Weaponizing Regulation: Hidden Dangers of the Art Market Integrity Act - Cultural Property News
Regulation: Hidden Dangers of the Art Market Integrity Act
Weaponizing Regulation: Hidden Dangers of the Art Market Integrity Act
S Capitol, Westside, 5 September 2013, Author Martin Falbisoner (1978–), CCA-SA 3.0 Unported license.
CCP Staff - July 28, 2025
PRECIS
Weaponizing Regulation: Hidden Dangers of the Art Market Integrity Act - Cultural Property News
On July 23, 2025, U.S. Senators John Fetterman, Chuck Grassley, Sheldon Whitehouse, Dave McCormick, Bill Cassidy, and Andy Kim introduced the Art Market Integrity Act. They called the bill “a commonsense proposal to apply anti-money laundering (AML) safeguards to high-risk art transactions.”
The dome of the US Capitol building, author Diliff, January 2006, CCA-SA 3.0 Unported license.
A press release from Chuck Grassley’s office stated that the legislation was necessary because the U.S. Treasury had identified that art market as a potential hotbed of money-laundering, terrorist financing and other illegal activity.
This bipartisan group of Senators have been misled. That is not what the U.S. Treasury reported in a major study in 2022.
The Art Market Integrity Act is anything but commonsense. It would seriously harm small U.S. businesses, museums, and collectors by imposing the same federal reporting obligations on ordinary transactions as if they were banks or casinos handling large sums in cash.
I. False and Misleading Claims in the Promotion of the Art Market Integrity Act
One of the loudest voices in support of this damaging legislation is the Antiquities Coalition. The Antiquities Coalition’s public messaging emphasizes that the illicit antiquities trade is a multi-billion dollar criminal industry financing extremists and erasing cultural heritage. Despite a striking lack of evidence for these claims, Antiquities Coalition has pursued this mission through high-profile partnerships, advocacy campaigns, and policy initiatives that have dramatically influenced the discourse and laws on cultural property over the past decade.
The promotion of this bill relies extensively on the false assertions and strategic omissions that characterize the Antiquities Coalition’s dubious claims about money laundering and terrorist finance. Below, we set out the facts and the counterarguments and examine plausible motivations for this latest effort to cripple the legitimate ethnographic, antiques, and antiquities art markets.
False Claim: The Art Market is a Significant Conduit for Money Laundering
Truth:
In 2020, there was an attempt, strongly backed by the Antiquities Coalition, to impose similar restrictions through the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021.
Department of Treasury North, author Diarrhea, 7 June 2012, CCA 3.0 Unported license.
Fortunately, Section 6110(c) of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 also directed the U.S. Department of the Treasury to study whether there was money laundering and terror finance taking place through the trade in works of art. The Department of the Treasury collected public testimony, did extensive research into the facts, and in February 2022 issued a Study of the Facilitation of Money Laundering and Terror Finance Through the Trade in Works of Art. The 2022 study concluded:
“Weighed against other sectors that pose ML/TF risks, the Study concludes that the art market should not be an immediate focus for the imposition of comprehensive AML/CFT requirements.”[1]
Treasury noted that in the future, there might be some value in requiring documentation in certain circumstances:
“For example, institutions selling near the range of $500,000–$1 million in annual sales could be subject to certain AML/CFT program requirements such as maintaining a customer identification program, implementing CDD obligations, hiring a compliance officer, and creating a system of internal controls to ensure ongoing compliance… consideration should also be given to imposing reporting requirements relating to a combination of purchases by a single buyer. For example, aggregate yearly transactions adding up to $200,000 conducted by a single buyer at a single art market institution could be subject to reporting requirements.”[2]
U.S. Treasury Department publication, Study of the Facilitation of Money Laundering and Terror Finance Through the Trade in Works of Art, February 2022. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury_Study_WoA.pdf
The Treasury study also noted that cash transactions were uncommon in the art market, which relied on ordinary business banking methods and U.S. banks and financial institutions subject to FinCEN regulation already tracked and documented high value transactions. Further, the study found that other market sectors including real estate posed a higher risk of money laundering than even the high value art market.
“While high-value art and the market in which it is traded can be abused by illicit financial actors to launder funds, the imposition of additional regulatory obligations on this sector should be made while considering other gaps and vulnerabilities in the U.S. AML/CFT regime that Treasury has prioritized under its risk-based approach to applying AML/CFT requirements and that may generate a significantly greater amount of illicit proceeds… As such, it is recommended that Treasury complete its ongoing work to close outstanding gaps in the U.S. AML/CFT regime related to beneficial ownership, real estate, and potentially investment advisers and nonfinancial gatekeepers before potentially turning its attention to the high-value art market.”[3]
This detailed 2022 Department of the Treasury study directly contradicts the claim that the art market is a “high-risk” sector on par with banks or casinos. In 2022, Treasury declined to impose additional AML regulations on the broader art market based on lack of evidence of wrongdoing. The 2024 study referenced in press releases for the Art Market Integrity Act states only briefly (in two paragraphs) that the art market is “susceptible to abuse” and cites back to the 2022 Treasury report.
Source: U.S. Treasury, Fact Sheet: Study of the Facilitation of Money Laundering and Terror Finance Through the Trade in Works of Art, Feb. 4, 2022. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury_Study_WoA.pdf
False Claim: Antiquities are Routinely Used to Finance Terrorism
Truth:
The claim that looted antiquities have financed groups like ISIS has been widely repeated by the Antiquities Coalition, but repeatedly debunked.
A 2016 article on ISIS and antiquities, by Fiona Rose-Greenland, a University of Chicago Postdoctoral Research Fellow noted that estimates of ISIS’s take from smuggling antiquities ranged from ranged from US $4 million to $7 billion. The Antiquities Coalition’s own estimates for illicit trafficking were among the highest. However, Rose-Greenland’s study said that the actual value was likely lower than the lowest popular estimates:
“What all of these caveats and complications boil down to is that ISIS is likely to have earned several million dollars in profit since launching its looting program.”[4]
In her article for the Washington Post, Rose-Greenland postulated that a terrorist action could be funded by as little as $10,000 but did not discuss ISIS’s actual key funding sources of oil, seizures of government resources, and extortion. She concluded that,
“While market mystique and over-the-top plot lines are fine for Hollywood films and adventure novels, it’s no way to understand terrorist finance, and without that understanding we are unlikely to arrive at genuine and lasting solutions.”[5]
“Tracking and Disrupting the Illicit
Antiquities Trade with Open-Source Data,” Rand Corporation, 2020.
A year later a major study by the RAND Corporation (2017) investigated claims that terrorism was funded by selling antiquities, including through the Internet and Dark Web. The RAND Corporation report disputed that antiquities were a major revenue stream for terrorist groups. Instead, it pointed to serious discrepancies between media reporting and market data collected by RAND investigators.
“Fueling this disconnect between reported looting and assumed markets for these goods is the problem that bloggers, journalists, and advocacy groups, although often producing high-quality research, are rewarded for sensational headlines and claims that bring attention to their issues and readers to their pages or sites. In the context of antiquities trafficking, this disconnect between the scale of looting and its estimated market value has led to seemingly exaggerated claims about the size of the market for these goods and has muted more-moderate voices in the debate arguing that, despite the appalling destruction that looters are causing to cultural heritage, the economic value of these goods is relatively small.”[6]
Furthermore, U.S. prosecutions involving antiquities have focused on provenance violations—not financing terrorism or organized crime.
Source: Matthew Sargent, James V. Marrone, Alexandra Evans, Bilyana Lilly, Erik Nemeth, Stephen Dalzell, Tracking and Disrupting the Illicit Antiquities Trade with Open-Source Data, 2020, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California.
See also: Katherine Brennan and Kate Fitz Gibbon, Bearing False Witness: The Media, ISIS and Antiquities, 2017, published as an Art and Heritage Law Report, Cultural Property News.
False Claim: The U.S. is the “Last Major Art Market” Without AML Controls
Truth:
Work of the United States Senate, 2008, Credited to the US Senate Photo Studio.
This is a deliberate exaggeration. The U.S. imposes robust AML requirements on financial institutions, and it has a large and well-funded system for prosecuting fraud and illicit trade. The U.S. Treasury Department chose not to apply Bank Secrecy Act rules to art dealers because the art trade showed far less risk of money laundering than other markets, including financial and real estate.
Moreover, “global standards” vary widely. China’s purported compliance is used here disingenuously — China uses state-controlled dealers, bans exports of nearly all antiquities, and violates the cultural rights of its own citizens, especially minorities such as Christians, Buddhists and Muslims, destroying churches, mosques and temples.
False Claim: The Bill Will Only Affect ‘High-Risk’ Actors
Truth:
The bill would force virtually all art market participants to meet burdensome reporting requirements by setting thresholds as low as $10,000 per transaction or $50,000 in annual sales. It includes:
Art and Antiques Dealers
Advisors
Auction houses
Museums
Custodians
Collectors
The scope is vast, and the compliance burdens imposed on individual collectors or a typical couple operating a small antiques shop, and affecting thousands of small businesses and nonprofit institutions, are potentially severe. Even the executors of estates would have to collect data on transactions and report sales of art collections to the federal government. The bill effectively treats all market participants, including small antiques dealers as financial institutions like banks.
Who would benefit by making tens of thousands of American small businesses subject to filing detailed reports under a new law?
Businesses selling anti-money laundering services like AML RightSource, among others. RightSource’s participation in Antiquities Coalition seminars and publicity should be noted, as well as the fact that RightSource’s Vice Chairman, John Byrne, served as the Co-Chairman with Deborah Lehr on the Antiquities Coalition’s Financial Crimes Task Force.[7] The Antiquities Coalition’s Financial Crimes Task Force Report (2020) made unsubstantiated claims about art trafficking and terrorism with no verifiable data. The Antiquities Coalition has made repeated claims that extending AML laws to antiquities is needed to combat “global terrorism,” though no U.S. criminal case has shown this link in practice.
Antiquities Coalition’s Role and History of Misleading Narratives
The Antiquities Coalition has consistently advocated for sweeping regulations and cultural protectionist policies that:
Conflate legal antiquities trade with criminal activity.
Exaggerate links between art and terrorism.
Promote repatriation narratives that ignore due process or ownership rights.
Support blanket repatriations based on ideological grounds, not legal ownership or provenance standards.
It is noteworthy that the Antiquities Coalition has received significant funding – $3.3 million in grants – from the U.S. State Department, much of it to promote seeking U.S. restrictions on art imports from foreign countries.[8]
III. Likely Intent to Target the Antiquities Market
Evidence of Intentional Targeting
Old Senate Chamber in the United States Capitol viewed from the South. Public domain website of the Architect of the Capitol.
The Antiquities Coalition explicitly lobbied for the 2021 amendment to the Bank Secrecy Act that extended AML coverage to antiquities dealers—the only sector singled out. The Antiquities Coalition praises the Art Market Integrity Act as fulfilling its own Financial Crimes Task Force report recommendation. The language and examples in the Antiquities Coalition’s press release specifically cite looted antiquities—though the Art Market Integrity Act covers fine art, not antiquities, conflating the far greater size of the fine art market with that of the antiquities trade – a misleading comparison often used by the Antiquities Coalition.
Ideological Goals
The Antiquities Coalition has long pursued a policy agenda aligned with:
Cultural nationalism: Promoting the idea that antiquities belong in modern nation-states where they originated, regardless of legal trade.
De-marketization: Seeking to eliminate the private trade of antiquities by regulatory overreach.
Selective transparency: Calling for traceability from collectors, but not from source countries with opaque or corrupt systems (e.g., Egypt, China).
IV. Counterarguments to the Justification for the Bill
Claim Counterargument
The bill protects “honest businesses.” It burdens legitimate businesses with compliance costs without addressing real criminal behavior.
Art is used to evade sanctions. These are isolated, headline-grabbing cases. AML compliance would not have prevented them; sanctions violations are already criminal offenses.
It brings the U.S. in line with international norms. The U.S. wisely exercised discretion based on its own risk assessments. Europe’s rules are widely criticized for chilling small art markets and lacking enforcement clarity.
The bill excludes artists and small businesses. That’s deceptive. Anyone exceeding $50,000 annually in art sales—a low bar—must comply, including estate sales, nonprofits, and academic institutions.
V. Conclusion
United States Capitol, Author Pierre Blaché, 31 October 2019, CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
The Art Market Integrity Act is not a “commonsense” reform. It is a Trojan horse, using the language of financial crime to pursue long-standing ideological goals aimed at eliminating the antiquities trade. Its foundation rests on false claims, misleading analogies, and disregard for the Treasury’s own findings.
By conflating art and antiquities, criminalizing legitimate market behavior, and imposing costly compliance burdens, the bill threatens not just dealers, but museums, collectors, and researchers. The public interest would be better served by evidence-based, narrowly tailored solutions—not the sweeping, ideologically driven regulation of ill-considered legislation like the Art Market Integrity Act.
