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The Bitcoin Policy Institute, together with a broad coalition of digital asset companies, has sent an open letter to the world's leading AI labs. The key demand is to provide trusted open-source developers with reliable access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence models to strengthen the protection of financial infrastructure.

The letter is supported by dozens of organizations working in digital assets, cybersecurity, and open source. Signatories include major custodians, payment services, security firms, and independent researchers whose businesses directly depend on the integrity of open protocols and libraries.

Infrastructure 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 asset infrastructure 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 attacks from 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 ecosystem—from wallets and cryptographic libraries to node software, custody systems, exchanges, and payment networks—the figure runs into 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 retirement 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 as bearer assets, so the path from a hack to lost funds is short. Under such conditions, it is especially important to find and close vulnerabilities in advance, the authors stress. 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—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 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 security landscape 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 is asking of the labs

Early access and reasonable compute budgets would help key developers create more secure code and find and fix vulnerabilities before losses occur. The coalition is asking frontier AI labs 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 cite "sufficient" computing power and the ability of autonomous agents to work on long-running tasks—without which meaningful security reviews cannot be conducted.

Separately, the coalition asks for secure environments for analyzing private or closed-source code, as well as the right for small, non-profit, and independent maintainers to participate on equal footing with large companies and states. The final item on the list 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 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 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 take: this is a landmark moment. An industry that has spent decades building open and decentralized infrastructure has finally realized that security without access to the most powerful AI tools becomes asymmetrical—in favor of attackers. If the labs do not respond to this call, we risk seeing a wave of incidents that could have been prevented. This is not just a request for access; it is a question of the ecosystem's survival in the age of AI.