Crypto news

The Bitcoin Policy Institute, along with dozens of companies in the digital assets sector, has published an open letter to the world's leading AI labs. The main demand is to provide verified open-source developers with reliable access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence models to protect financial infrastructure.

The letter was signed by representatives of major players: from custodians and payment services to security firms and wallet developers. This step is not just a formality, but a signal of a critical imbalance in the arms race between defenders and attackers.

Defenders are left without the strongest tools

The letter emphasizes that the need for such access has become evident over the past few weeks. Specialists ensuring the security of digital assets and open-source software urgently need the latest AI capabilities for thorough code review. Without this, it is difficult for them to counter increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Open source has long become financial infrastructure. According to the authors' estimates, the Bitcoin network alone safeguards over a trillion dollars, while the entire digital assets ecosystem—from wallets and cryptographic libraries to exchanges and payment networks—manages sums in the trillions of dollars. This infrastructure is openly developed by companies, non-profit organizations, and independent researchers.

Behind this software are the personal funds of millions of people—retirement savings, business capital, and family nest eggs. A single vulnerability can wipe out a lifetime's worth of wealth.

Cryptocurrencies are an attractive target for hackers: the path from a breach to lost funds is extremely short. Therefore, it is critical to find and close gaps in advance. Cutting-edge AI changes the economics for both security researchers and attackers—the question is who gets access to it first.

Defenders occupy the least privileged position

Advanced models are capable of analyzing massive codebases, identifying weaknesses, and accelerating complex technical work. However, the authors expect these capabilities to spread through public open-source models, unauthorized access to corporate systems, and specialized hacker tools.

Today, leading labs and select partners see new cyber capabilities months before they become available to the rest of the ecosystem. At the same time, access paths to such tools for qualified defenders remain limited and inconsistent. Many digital asset developers, including Bitcoin Core maintainers, are excluded from lab programs.

Restrictions on public frontier systems often block legitimate security work. Defenders are forced to conduct critical checks on less powerful open-weight models. According to the authors, developers occupy the most vulnerable position in the entire security framework surrounding AI.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute received several independent reports from open-source maintainers. According to them, experienced attackers are conducting continuous AI-assisted attacks, and small teams struggle to keep up with such a pace.

Even when systems remain secure, responding to constant and sophisticated activity diverts scarce maintainer resources away from development and routine security work. Bitcoin developers and other researchers are around the clock checking wallets, libraries, protocols, and open tools using available open-weight models.

What the coalition asks of the labs

Early access and reasonable compute budgets would help key developers create more secure code and find vulnerabilities before losses occur. The coalition asks frontier AI labs to create or expand standing trusted access programs for qualified defenders of open financial infrastructure.

Such programs should provide early, controlled access to the strongest cyber models, and where appropriate, pre-release versions. Among the conditions, the authors also cite "sufficient" compute power and the operation of autonomous agents on long-running tasks—without this, meaningful security reviews are simply impossible.

Separately, the coalition requests secure environments for analyzing private or closed-source code, as well as the right for small, non-profit, and independent maintainers to participate on par with large companies and states. The final point is a direct channel for coordinated vulnerability reporting, remediation, and communication with lab security teams.

The digital assets industry is ready to help identify trusted participants, establish standards, and coordinate remediation efforts. Frontier AI could become one of the most powerful defensive technologies—but only with fair access to such systems.

The letter was signed by representatives of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Coinbase, Block, Blockstream, BitGo, Anchorage Digital, Bitwise, Trezor, MARA, Foundry, Galaxy, Strategy, Strike, and River, as well as dozens of other participants from the digital assets, cybersecurity, and open-source sectors.

My take: This step is a long-overdue attempt to level the playing field in cybersecurity. While AI labs provide privileged access to a limited circle of partners, defenders of critical infrastructure remain in the rear guard. Without a systemic solution to this imbalance, we risk seeing a wave of incidents whose scale will surpass all known crypto market hacks.