The crypto industry is demanding that AI labs open access to their models — trillions of dollars are at stake.
Bitcoin Policy Institute and a broad coalition of digital asset companies have published an open letter to the world's leading AI labs. The main demand is to provide vetted open-source developers with reliable access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence models to protect financial infrastructure. This concerns the security of assets measured in trillions of dollars.
Dozens of organizations representing the digital currency sector, cybersecurity, and the open-source movement have signed the letter. Among them are major custodians, payment services, and security firms whose business directly depends on the integrity of public blockchains and cryptographic libraries.
Infrastructure Defenders Remain 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 comprehensive audits. Without this, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to counter sophisticated attacks by malicious actors.
Open source has long become financial infrastructure. According to the authors' estimates, the Bitcoin network alone safeguards more than a trillion dollars. Across the entire ecosystem—from wallets and cryptographic libraries to node software, custodial systems, exchanges, and payment networks—the figure is already in the trillions. This infrastructure is openly developed by companies, non-profit organizations, independent researchers, and grant-funded maintainers.
Behind this software are the personal funds of millions of people: pension savings, business capital, reserve funds, and family wealth. A single vulnerability can wipe out a lifetime of savings. Digital assets attract cyberattacks precisely for this reason.
Many cryptocurrencies are designed so that the path from a hack to lost funds is extremely short. Under such conditions, it is critically important to find and close vulnerabilities in advance, the authors emphasize. Cutting-edge AI is meanwhile changing the economics for both security researchers and attackers.
Defenders Occupy the Least Privileged Position
Advanced models are capable of scanning vast codebases, identifying potential weaknesses, and accelerating complex technical work—both for defenders and attackers. The authors expect these capabilities to continue spreading through public open-source models, unauthorized access to corporate systems, and specialized tools for cyberattacks.
Today, leading labs and select partners see new cyber capabilities months before they reach the rest of the ecosystem. At the same time, 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 checks on less powerful open-weight models. According to the authors, developers occupy the most vulnerable position in the entire security ecosystem around AI.
Bitcoin Policy Institute received several independent reports from open-source maintainers. According to them, sophisticated attackers, possibly from other countries, are conducting continuous AI-assisted attacks, and small teams find it difficult to sustain such a pace.
Even when systems remain protected, responding to persistent and complex 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, the authors add.
What the Coalition Asks of the Labs
Early access and reasonable compute budgets would help key developers create more secure code, as well as 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, to pre-release versions. Among the conditions, the authors also cite "sufficient" compute resources and the ability for autonomous agents to work on long-running tasks—without which meaningful security reviews cannot be conducted.
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 contact with lab security teams.
The digital asset industry is ready to help identify trusted participants, establish standards, and coordinate remediation when issues are discovered. 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 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 asset, cybersecurity, and open-source spheres.
My take: This is a landmark moment. The crypto industry is for the first time so consolidated in advocating for the democratization of AI access, recognizing that the asymmetry between attackers and defenders is becoming an existential threat. If the labs ignore the call, we risk a wave of incidents whose scale will surpass all known DeFi hacks combined.