Crypto news

The Bitcoin Policy Institute and a broad coalition of digital asset companies have sent an open letter to the world's leading AI labs. The core demand is to provide vetted open-source developers with reliable access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence models to protect financial infrastructure from growing threats.

Dozens of organizations representing digital assets, cybersecurity, and the open-source community have signed the letter. Among them are developers, major custodians, payment services, and security firms whose businesses directly depend on the integrity of open infrastructure and libraries.

Infrastructure Defenders Left Without the Strongest Tools

The letter emphasizes that the need for such access has become evident over the past few weeks. Specialists protecting digital asset infrastructure and open-source software need the latest AI capabilities to conduct thorough security reviews. Without this, they struggle to counter increasingly sophisticated adversaries.

Open source has long become financial infrastructure. According to the authors' estimates, the Bitcoin network alone safeguards over a trillion dollars, and across the entire digital asset ecosystem—from wallets and signing devices to cryptographic libraries, node software, custody systems, exchanges, and payment networks—the figure runs into trillions of dollars. This infrastructure is openly developed by companies, non-profits, independent researchers, and grant-funded maintainers.

Behind this software are the personal funds of millions of people. These are retirement savings, business capital, reserve funds, and family wealth, so a single vulnerability can wipe out a lifetime of savings. Digital assets attract cyberattacks precisely for this reason.

Many cryptocurrencies are structured so that the path from a hack to lost funds is short. In such conditions, it is especially important to find and patch vulnerabilities in advance, the authors stress. Cutting-edge AI is meanwhile changing the economics for both security researchers and attackers.

Defenders Hold the Least Privileged Position

Advanced models can review large codebases, identify potential weaknesses, and accelerate complex technical work—for both defenders and attackers alike. The authors expect these capabilities to continue spreading through public open-source models, unauthorized access to corporate systems, and specialized cyberattack tools.

Today, leading labs and select partners see new cyber capabilities months before they reach the rest of the ecosystem. Meanwhile, access pathways 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. As a result, defenders are forced to conduct critical reviews on less powerful open-weight models. According to the letter's authors, developers occupy the most vulnerable position in the entire AI security landscape.

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

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

What the Coalition Asks of the Labs

Early access and reasonable compute budgets would help key developers write more secure code and find and fix 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 resources and the ability to run autonomous agents on long-horizon tasks—without which meaningful security reviews cannot be conducted.

Separately, the coalition asks for secure environments to analyze private or closed-source code, as well as participation rights for small, non-profit, and independent maintainers on par with large companies and governments. The final item on the list is a direct channel for coordinated vulnerability reporting, remediation, and communication with lab security teams.

The digital asset industry is ready to help identify trusted participants, establish standards, and coordinate remediation when issues are found. Frontier AI, in the authors' view, could become one of the most powerful defensive technologies in history—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, along with dozens of other participants from the digital asset, cybersecurity, and open-source sectors.

My take: this move is a logical continuation of a long-overdue conflict between the closed nature of AI development and the needs of the open-source ecosystem. While labs view AI as a threat and restrict access, defenders remain at a disadvantage against attackers. Without transparent trusted access programs, we risk a wave of incidents that could have been prevented at the model development stage.