Crypto news

The Bitcoin Policy Institute, together with dozens of leading players in the crypto industry, has sent an open appeal to the largest artificial intelligence laboratories. The coalition insists on providing verified open-source developers with reliable access to advanced AI models to protect financial infrastructure.

The appeal has been signed by dozens of organizations from the digital assets, cybersecurity, and open-source development sectors. Among them are developers, major custodians, payment services, and security firms whose business directly depends on the integrity of open infrastructure and libraries.

Infrastructure defenders remain without the strongest tools

In the open letter, the authors emphasize 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 need the latest AI capabilities to fully verify security. Without this, it is difficult for them to counter increasingly 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, and across the entire digital assets ecosystem—from wallets and signing devices to cryptographic libraries, node software, custodial systems, exchanges, and payment networks—the figure is in the 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 designed in such 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 of the appeal 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 reviewing large 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 laboratories 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 laboratory programs.

Restrictions on public advanced 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, experienced 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 sophisticated activity diverts scarce maintainer resources away from development and routine security work. Bitcoin developers and other security 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 laboratories

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 advanced AI laboratories to create or expand permanent 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 mention "sufficient" computing power and autonomous agents working on long-running tasks—without this, meaningful security checks cannot be conducted.

Separately, the coalition asks for secure environments for analyzing private or closed-source 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 through which vulnerabilities can be reported in a coordinated manner, remediated, and communication established with laboratory security teams.

The digital assets industry is ready to help identify trusted participants, establish standards, and coordinate remediation when issues are discovered. Cutting-edge AI, according to the authors, 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 assets, cybersecurity, and open-source sectors.

My view: 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 ecosystem security directly depends on the symmetry of capabilities between defense and attack. If laboratories ignore the call, we risk a world where attackers are better armed than those guarding trillions of dollars.