Crypto news

The Bitcoin Policy Institute and dozens of leading crypto industry companies have sent an open letter to the world's largest AI labs. The coalition insists on providing verified open-source developers with reliable access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence models—this is critical for protecting financial infrastructure managing trillions of dollars.

The letter has been signed by representatives of dozens of organizations from the digital asset, cybersecurity, and open-source development sectors. These include custodians, payment services, and security firms whose businesses directly depend on the integrity of open infrastructure and cryptographic libraries.

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 is extremely difficult for them to counter increasingly sophisticated attackers.

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 crypto libraries, node software, custodial systems, exchanges, and payment networks—this amounts to trillions of dollars. 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. These are pension savings, business capital, reserve funds, and family wealth, so a single vulnerability can take away a lifetime of savings. Digital assets attract cyberattacks precisely for this reason.

Many cryptocurrencies are structured in a way that the path from a hack to losing money is short. Under such conditions, it is especially important to find and close vulnerabilities in advance, the authors emphasize. Advanced AI is meanwhile changing the economics for both security researchers and attackers.

Defenders occupy the least privileged position

Advanced models are capable of reviewing large codebases, identifying potential weaknesses, and accelerating 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 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 paths to such tools for qualified defenders remain limited and inconsistent. Many digital asset developers, including Bitcoin Core maintainers, are denied access to 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 letter's 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, 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 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 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" computing power and the operation of autonomous agents on long-running tasks—without this, meaningful security reviews cannot be conducted.

Separately, the coalition asks for secure environments for analyzing private or closed code, as well as granting participation rights to small, non-profit, and independent maintainers on par with large companies and states. 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, as well as dozens of other participants from the digital asset, cybersecurity, and open-source sectors.

My comment: This step is a timely recognition that the battle for security in the crypto industry has moved to a new level. While AI labs focus on commercial partnerships and government contracts, open-source defenders remain on the sidelines of the technological race. If labs do not open their doors, we risk a world where the most powerful AI tools are available only to attackers, creating systemic risk for the entire digital economy.