Vitalik Buterin Says Crypto Anti-Collusion Rules Could Apply to AI Safety

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that the anti-collusion mechanisms he mapped out for blockchain governance back in 2020 might turn out to matter more for AI safety than for crypto itself.

He was responding to an essay by researcher Eric Drexler that used a recent OpenAI security test, in which thousands of AI agents built an unauthorized coordination network and attacked Hugging Face’s production systems, as a live example of the same dynamic he described six years ago.

A Familiar Problem With a New Set of Players

In a September 14 X post, Buterin described a “deep duality” between crypto governance and multi-agent AI systems. In his comparison, the principal in crypto is a static algorithm dealing with human agents, while an AI safety system could involve humans and weaker large language models managing stronger ones.

He pointed to his September 11, 2020, essay, “Coordination, Good and Bad,” where he suggested that systems can produce better outcomes when limits exist on how much agents can collude.

The developer contrasted the abundance of Nash equilibria in individual-choice game theory with cooperative game theory, where stable “cores” can be absent because coalitions can profit by changing the outcome.