More than three dozen bitcoin companies from the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency sector have called on leading artificial intelligence labs to give security specialists early access to the most powerful models. The signatories believe that developers defending infrastructure worth trillions of dollars are currently forced to work with weaker tools than those used by attackers searching for vulnerabilities.
What the Companies Are Demanding
The letter was prepared by the Bitcoin Policy Institute. Among the signatories:
- Coinbase — cryptocurrency exchange;
- Block — payments and Bitcoin infrastructure company;
- BitGo and Anchorage Digital — custodial platforms;
- Blockstream — Bitcoin infrastructure developer;
- ARK Invest and Bitwise — investment product managers;
- Foundry — company from the mining sector;
- Casa and Exodus — wallet and storage services;
- Brink, Chaincode, and Btrust — funds and organizations supporting developers.
The main complaint is about access to closed programs for trusted cybersecurity partners. Bitcoin Core developers, who maintain the network’s key software, are not included in such programs. When they use public models, built-in security filters often interfere not only with malicious scenarios but also with legitimate bug hunting.
As a result, defenders have to rely on models with open weights. These can be freely downloaded, but in terms of capabilities, they generally lag behind the most advanced systems of major AI labs.
For defenders of Bitcoin infrastructure, early access to strong AI models is not an advantage but a way to check code before similar capabilities become available to attackers.
Why This Matters for Bitcoin Infrastructure
The signatories claim that attackers are not bound by such restrictions. According to them, new attacking capabilities are initially available to labs and a narrow circle of partners, but eventually leak out anyway—through public models, stolen access to corporate systems, and specially created hacker tools.
For the digital asset industry, this is becoming a matter of the resilience of the entire infrastructure. Bitcoin has long been seen not only as a digital currency but also as an asset on the balance sheet of companies, funds, and private holders. Therefore, failures in core software can affect exchanges, payment services, custodial platforms, and users who hold cash or United States dollars alongside crypto assets as part of a unified financial strategy.
The letter formulates five main requests:
- early access to the strongest AI models with cyber capabilities, including before public release;
- sufficient compute limits for full code review;
- secure test environments for analyzing closed software;
- admission of independent and small maintainers, not just major market participants;
- a direct communication channel with AI lab security teams to report discovered issues.
Recent Attacks Have Increased Pressure on AI Labs
The timing of the appeal does not seem coincidental. In recent weeks, two signatories have faced situations that clearly illustrate both sides of the problem.
BTCPay Server reported a critical vulnerability that attackers had already used to target merchants’ Lightning nodes. Foundation, a hardware wallet manufacturer and also a letter participant, lost its own node in the same attack. Afterward, BTCPay Server noted that AI is changing the balance between attackers and defenders: finding weaknesses in large codebases is becoming faster and cheaper.
At the same time, the problem itself was found by defenders. The volunteer group Bitcoin Red Team began running Bitcoin project code through AI models and sent thousands of results across hundreds of repositories. One such report became the basis for the BTCPay Server patch.
Context for the Financial Market
Major financial players depend on the reliability of blockchain infrastructure. Coinbase operates as a crypto exchange, BitGo and Anchorage Digital as custodians, Block is linked to payment infrastructure, Bitwise and ARK Invest to investment products, Foundry to the mining sector, and Casa and Exodus to wallets and asset storage. For such companies, code security is directly tied to market liquidity, operational risks, and client trust.
There are already examples on the market of companies for which Bitcoin has become a significant part of their financial model. MicroStrategy remains the most prominent example of corporate Bitcoin reserves, and the industry is discussing treasury strategies, crypto asset exchange-traded funds, and derivatives such as options. In such an environment, an error in infrastructure code can quickly go beyond a single project.
The signatories are essentially asking AI labs to recognize open-source developers as full participants in the security perimeter. Their argument is simple: if a bank, exchange, or major technology company gets access to advanced security tools, then maintainers of critically important crypto code should not be left behind.
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