Bitcoin Companies Want Help From AI Labs to Guard Against Hackers

In brief

• Coinbase, Block, BitGo and 40-plus firms put their names to an open letter demanding frontier labs open trusted-access programs to qualified defenders.
• The Bitcoin Policy Institute organized it; signatories include Blockstream, ARK Invest among others.
• The gap is practical: the people patching wallets and node software can't reach the best models, while the people attacking them already can.

More than 40 bitcoin and crypto firms asked the biggest AI labs this week to let independent security researchers use their strongest models before public release.

The letter, published August 10, rests on a simple asymmetry. The Bitcoin network secures more than a trillion dollars, and the wider stack—wallets, signing devices, libraries, custody systems—holds trillions more. That code is written in the open, and one bug can erase someone's savings.

Yet the maintainers keeping it running can't get into the vetted researcher programs the AI labs run. When they reach for a public model, the guardrails shut down a legitimate hunt for flaws. So they lean on open-weight systems they can run themselves, which is useful, but a step behind the frontier—and the hackers attacking cryptocurrency networks.