Bitcoin Companies Want Help From AI Labs to Guard Against Hackers

“It is clear that early access and reasonable compute budgets would help core developers produce more secure code and identify and remediate vulnerabilities before losses occur,” the letter reads. “We, therefore, ask frontier AI labs to establish or expand standing trusted-access programs for qualified defenders of open-source financial infrastructure.”

The letter points out labs and a few partners get a months-long look at new attack capabilities before the rest of the world, and those capabilities escape anyway through public releases and compromised systems.

The labs haven't committed

Late last month the Bitcoin Security Consortium—BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy, Anchorage, ARK, Block, Blockstream, Fidelity Digital Assets and Galaxy—committed $15 million to the network's long-term security. The letter targets a different gap: not money for tomorrow's threats, but today's models for the maintainers patching them.

As of today, the big AI labs have not shared any public stance on this specific topic, however, the companies are working on better safeguards that would prevent their models’ abilities to be used for malicious intentions, no matter if it’s for blockchain coding or any other usage.

Anthropic has shown how the same models power "vibe hacking"—criminals running live Bitcoin-ransom attacks with AI help—and says the tools make offense cheaper. Giving defenders stronger models means picking who qualifies and trusting them not to leak.

The letter asks the labs to take that risk anyway.