AI is making crypto security cheaper, faster and harder to ignore

Urbelis said he believes AI could eventually reshape the standard of care around smart contract development. Historically, teams could point to the cost and complexity of audits as a reason certain reviews were not performed. That argument becomes more difficult when sophisticated security analysis is available on demand.

“A clean AI report will be seen as no defense,” he said. “A plaintiff may well argue it the other way: the tool existed, it was cheap, and you should have caught it.”

The prospect raises broader questions for the industry: if AI-powered security reviews become ubiquitous, will investors expect them before funding projects, and could failing to run AI-assisted audits eventually be viewed as negligence?

Despite the technology’s promise, neither researcher said he believes AI is poised to replace human auditors.

While machines excel at identifying coding flaws, Urbelis said they remain weaker at spotting the economic and incentive-based vulnerabilities that have contributed to some of crypto’s largest losses. “The bugs that drain treasuries often turn on intent and adversarial incentives,” he said. “Those still need an experienced human in the room.”

Schwed offered a similar warning. “‘Claude, audit my smart contract, make no mistakes’ is not a security program,” he said. “If the person running the tool can’t evaluate what comes back, you haven’t bought security, you’ve bought a false sense of it.”