Application of AI to detect anomalous transactions as a new direction in combating money laundering

The aim of the study was to examine the effectiveness of applying artificial-intelligence algorithms in the financial-monitoring system. The methodology included a comparative analysis of the practices of the United States, the European Union and Ukraine, a case analysis of international financial incidents (United States, European Union, Ukraine), and an assessment of the regulatory framework. It was established that the regulatory basis for a rule-based system is enshrined in the international standards of the Financial Action Task Force and implemented in the legislation of the European Union, the United States and Ukraine, which ensures transparency of control while simultaneously reducing adaptability to new schemes. In the United States, legal norms ensure strict reporting and sanctions, yet these norms demonstrated critical gaps in rule-based monitoring. In the European Union, multi-level directives strengthened centralised supervision while preserving the problem of bureaucratic inertia. In Ukraine, cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering still remained limited. It was identified that in the 2024 judgments of the High Anti-Corruption Court there were recorded cases of using fractional land deals totalling more than 3.1 million dollars, as well as large-scale organised schemes that rule-based systems did not detect. The 2024 statistics (1.75 million financial reports, UAH 12.1 billion of seized assets) demonstrated the scale of Ukraine’s Anti-Money Laundering system but revealed the need to reduce false positives and strengthen analytics. Alignment with international practice showed that the effectiveness of future anti-money-laundering solutions for Ukraine is possible only if the regulatory framework is combined with AI models that meet the requirements of the Financial Action Task Force and the European Union. The practical significance lay in applying the results by banks, regulators and law-enforcement bodies of Ukraine to reduce false positives, detect complex schemes and adapt monitoring systems to international standards