Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin admitted that artificial intelligence successfully revealed his anonymous authorship. The case involves a revision of the network improvement proposal — EIP-7503, published in December 2024. An analysis conducted by Co-Invest head Franklin Van using AI confirmed that Buterin is indeed the author of this document.
Anonymity Experiment
On June 22, 2026, Buterin launched a public experiment to test how much AI threatens internet anonymity. He asked participants to find, among many documents, the one he had written anonymously. The winner was Van: his team analyzed 27 texts and estimated the probability of Buterin's authorship at about 20% — ten times higher than for any other candidate.
How Did AI Manage to Reveal the Author?
Buterin deliberately tried to conceal his authorship. He wrote the document in Chinese, then translated it into English using the Qwen 2.5 language model and manually corrected all translation errors. However, AI still managed to identify him. As Van noted: "The main signal was not his words, but his way of reasoning." The Ethereum co-founder confirmed this, stating that "the stylistic markers detected by AI related to intellectual habits and the way of explaining algorithms, rather than linguistic features."
Context and Implications
This experiment is not just a game. In February 2026, researchers from ETH Zurich and Anthropic published a report concluding that large language models are already capable of helping de-anonymize users through analysis of texts from open sources. Lighter head Vladimir Novakowski noted that back in 2023, together with Van, he tried to apply a similar approach to identify the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but at that time they could not obtain a result with high confidence. Now the method has worked.
My Expert Assessment
This case highlights a fundamental problem: anonymity on the internet, based solely on text stylistics, is becoming an illusion. Even with multi-layered masking — language change, machine translation, manual editing — the author's intellectual habits remain a unique "digital fingerprint." For the crypto community, where anonymity is often a key principle, this is an alarming signal. The future of privacy will likely require not just hiding one's identity, but a complete restructuring of communication methods and the use of AI tools for protection, rather than attack.