Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed that artificial intelligence successfully revealed his anonymous authorship. The document in question is EIP-7503, which Buterin published in December 2024, deliberately concealing his identity. The winner of the experiment was Co-Invest head Franklin Van, whose team used AI analysis to establish authorship with a probability of about 20% — ten times higher than any other candidate.
How the experiment was conducted
On June 22, Buterin launched a public challenge to test how much AI threatens anonymity online. He asked participants to find an Ethereum document he had written several years ago but had not disclosed his name. Van and his team analyzed 27 texts and concluded that the style of presenting mathematical and technical ideas gave Buterin away. "The main signal was not his words, but his way of reasoning," Van noted after the result was confirmed.
Masking methods and failure
Buterin specifically tried to hide his authorship: he wrote the document in Chinese, then translated it into English using the local Qwen 2.5 model and manually corrected errors. However, AI was not fooled. "The stylistic features that AI detected related to intellectual habits and the way of explaining algorithms, not language features," the Ethereum co-founder explained.
Context and consequences
The experiment was inspired by a February report from researchers at ETH Zurich and Anthropic, who concluded that large language models are already capable of de-anonymizing users through analysis of open texts. Lighter head Vladimir Novakovsky noted that in 2023, he and Van tried to identify Satoshi Nakamoto's identity based on the style of cryptographic publications, but the result was not convincing at the time. Van applied the same method in Buterin's experiment and succeeded.
My analysis
This case is a warning signal for the entire crypto community. If AI can identify an author even after deliberate masking through translation and manual editing, then anonymity online becomes an illusion. For investors and developers who value privacy, this means a need to reconsider approaches to publishing content. At the same time, Buterin continues to focus on Ethereum's future: in early July, he presented a new roadmap where priorities include quantum resistance, privacy, and scaling. Perhaps these areas will help preserve anonymity in the age of AI.