Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that an AI analysis conducted by Co-Invest head Franklin Van accurately identified his authorship of the anonymous rewrite of EIP-7503. This case became a vivid demonstration of how far de-anonymization technologies have advanced.
On June 22, Buterin launched a public experiment to test whether artificial intelligence truly threatens internet anonymity. He asked participants to find a document for Ethereum that he had published several years ago. The winner was Van: using AI, his team identified that the programmer wrote the anonymous rewrite of EIP-7503 from December 2024. During the analysis, specialists examined 27 texts and estimated the probability of Buterin's authorship at about 20% — a figure roughly ten times higher than that of the next candidate.
How AI "Identified" Buterin
Buterin said he deliberately tried to conceal his authorship: he wrote the document in Chinese, then translated it into English using Qwen 2.5 and manually corrected the text. However, AI was able to identify him through the specifics of explaining mathematical and technical ideas. "The main signal was not his words, but the way of reasoning," Van noted after confirming the result.
Buterin himself emphasized that "the stylistic features detected by AI related to intellectual habits and the way of explaining algorithms, not to linguistic characteristics." This is a key conclusion: even when changing language and writing style, deep cognitive patterns remain unique.
Context and Implications
The experiment was prompted by a February report from researchers at ETH Zurich and Anthropic, who concluded that large language models are already capable of assisting in de-anonymizing internet users through analysis of texts from open sources. Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski noted that in 2023, together with Van, he used a similar approach to attempt to identify the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, based on the style of cryptographic publications. However, the researchers were unable to achieve a result with high confidence at that time.
My comment: This experiment is a warning signal for the entire crypto community. If AI can de-anonymize even such an experienced user as Buterin, who consciously tried to conceal his authorship, then it calls into question the very concept of anonymity on the internet. In the coming years, we will likely see a rise in demand for tools that not only encrypt data but also mask the user's cognitive patterns. Otherwise, privacy on the internet risks becoming an illusion.