Gold Cannot Be Frozen: Why America’s Oldest Strategic Asset Is More Critical Than Ever

By Ivan Sascha Sheehan
Monday, February 9, 2026

As geopolitical instability accelerates, gold is becoming a core holding in investor portfolios. After a record-breaking 2025, bullion entered 2026 with renewed momentum.

For decades, modern financial elites dismissed gold as a relic—useful for jewelry, symbolic at best, irrelevant at worst. Yet in an era of great-power competition, artificial intelligence, and weaponized finance, gold is quietly reasserting itself as one of the most strategic assets in the global system.

Far from making gold obsolete, the next wave of technology is reinforcing its importance—while modernizing the industry that supports it.

Artificial intelligence has transformed nearly every major financial market. Trading is faster, analytics are deeper, and capital moves at machine speed. AI now powers algorithmic trading, real-time geopolitical risk analysis, and sophisticated parsing of central-bank signals.

But while AI has increased efficiency, it has not solved the core problem gold was designed to address: trust. In a world where digital systems can be hacked, frozen, sanctioned, or manipulated, physical gold remains one of the few assets that exists outside the digital financial architecture. Technology has not weakened this reality—it has sharpened it.

The United States has rightly used financial sanctions as a tool of national power. But those tools carry consequences. America’s adversaries are learning quickly that dollar-based systems—especially those dependent on digital intermediaries—are vulnerable. Foreign governments now deploy advanced analytics to stress-test reserve portfolios, model sanctions exposure, and simulate financial isolation.

The conclusion many have reached is simple: gold cannot be frozen by an algorithm. That is why central banks—particularly outside the Western alliance—are buying gold at the fastest pace in decades.

It’s a strategy. For the United States, this trend is both a warning and an opportunity.

Gold is not merely a commodity—it’s a barometer of confidence in the global system America built. AI is not replacing gold’s importance—but it is transforming the physical infrastructure that supports it.

Today, much of the world’s gold flows through a small number of refineries and trading hubs. Control over refining, certification, and traceability means control over market access. Whoever sets the standards for gold refining shapes the market itself.

Here, advanced analytics and AI are quietly strengthening the physical gold supply chain, improving refining efficiency, supply-chain security, and sanctions compliance.

The world’s leading refineries already reflect this shift. Valcambi, the largest precious-metals refinery globally, operates a highly automated facility that uses robotics and advanced process controls to maximize yield, consistency, and safety at scale. Its integration of blockchain-based traceability systems allows gold to be tracked from mine of origin through refining and into secure vaults—creating the data foundation for AI-driven optimization and risk management in one of the world’s oldest markets.

Turkey’s Ahlatci Metal Refinery offers another example. It has built advanced digital compliance architecture designed to eliminate blind spots across the entire gold value chain. Through AI-enabled source verification systems, the refinery continuously validates the origin of incoming material, cross-checking supplier data with sanction lists, geolocation risk indicators, and historical trade behavior. Machine-learning models flag irregular shipment patterns and documentation inconsistencies in real time, turning compliance from a static checklist into an operational control system that prevents tainted gold from ever entering production.

Metalor Technologies, with refineries spanning Switzerland, the United States, Hong Kong, and Singapore, leverages its global footprint to aggregate data across diverse supply chains. Metalor is known for its Bullion Protect technology—a digital authentication and protection system for one-kilogram gold bars designed to prevent counterfeiting and tampering. Additionally, Metalor invests in investigation into biometric markings, blockchain, and material isotopic signatures to enhance provenance tracking and source verification—all technologies that can be combined with machine learning models to identify patterns or anomalies across supply chains.

These technologies are being deployed because gold market standards are still largely set by the West. But that leadership is not guaranteed. If the United States and its allies retreat from physical market leadership, others will fill the gap—often with lower transparency and weaker rule-of-law standards.

As Washington races to invest in AI, it should remember that financial power is not just about speed and sophistication. It’s one of the few assets that cannot be digitally erased, frozen by sanctions, or rendered obsolete by technological disruption. It’s universally recognized across cultures, regimes, and crises.

The rise of artificial intelligence does not change these facts. It makes them more important than ever.

Ivan Sascha Sheehan is the interim dean of the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore where he is a professor of public and international affairs. The views expressed are the author’s own. Follow him on X @ProfSheehan.