Bloomberg Surveillance · Thursday, August 6, 2026
Paul Sank expresses strong concern over Blackstone's plan to use artificial intelligence to gather data across private oil companies and royalty owners. He highlights that this data could include personal financial information like bank account and social security numbers. Sank fears that this centralized data pool, accessible through open servers, could be vulnerable to bad actors and that Blackstone is operating akin to an unregulated bank.
“So Intervius is compiling data on every user or every royalty owner and actually every oil producer. They have data down to the graneur level on wells, on property holdings.”
“But now Blackstone is putting itself in a position of grabbing all of this data across private companies. And of course, if you're a royalty owner, they know your bank account, they know your social security number.”
“They use open servers across the globe, and so any bad actor can just go right into it.”
“They're acting like a bank and they're not regulated like a bank.”