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The Bitcoin Policy Institute, along with dozens of companies in the digital asset, cybersecurity, and open-source development sectors, has published an open letter to the world's leading AI labs. The coalition demands that vetted open-source developers be granted reliable access to advanced artificial intelligence models to protect financial infrastructure.

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 ensuring the security of digital assets and open-source software urgently require the latest AI capabilities to thoroughly verify system security. Without this, they find it increasingly difficult to counter sophisticated attacks by malicious actors.

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 cryptographic libraries to node software, custody 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 wipe out a lifetime of savings. Digital assets attract cyberattacks precisely for this reason.

Many cryptocurrencies are structured such that the path from a hack to lost funds is short. Under these conditions, it is especially important to find and patch vulnerabilities in advance, the letter's authors emphasize. Advanced AI, meanwhile, is changing the economics for both security researchers and attackers.

Defenders Occupy the Least Privileged Position

Advanced models are capable of scanning 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 framework surrounding AI.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute received several independent reports from open-source maintainers. According to them, skilled 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 secure, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 take: this move is not merely a request for access, but a signal of a fundamental shift in the balance of cyber forces. If labs do not open their doors to defenders, we risk a world where AI-driven attacks become the norm, while defense remains stuck at the level of the past decade. The question is not whether access is needed, but how quickly the industry can institutionalize it.