Crypto Companies Urge AI Firms to Give Bitcoin Devs Early Access

A group of cryptocurrency companies has urged frontier artificial intelligence (AI) labs to give Bitcoin developers early access to their most capable models.

The letter, published by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) on Monday, said many digital asset defenders, including Bitcoin Core developers, lack access to lab cyber programs and can be blocked by guardrails on publicly available frontier systems, leaving them to rely on less capable open-weight models.

The signatories urged frontier AI labs to “establish or expand standing trusted-access programs for qualified defenders of open-source financial infrastructure.” 

The letter said open-source software supports critical digital and financial infrastructure, while Bitcoin (BTC) alone secures more than $1 trillion in value. It added that a vulnerability in open-source infrastructure can place life savings at risk.

The open letter was co-signed by multiple crypto companies and organizations, including the African Bitcoin Institute, Anchorage Digital, BitGo, Bitwise, Blockstream, Bull Bitcoin, MARA, Kraken, Ledger and Trezor, among others.

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Open-source defenders need access to frontier AI

The letter said frontier AI is changing the economics of security research and cyber operations because advanced models can search large codebases, identify potential weaknesses and accelerate complex technical work for both defenders and adversaries.

It said frontier AI could become one of the “most powerful defensive technologies ever developed,” adding:

“Without dedicated access programs, defenders may lack the tools needed to keep pace with evolving threats to the infrastructure they maintain.” 

The BPI said it received multiple independent reports from open-source maintainers describing sophisticated actors, including potential foreign adversaries, using advanced AI capabilities to sustain attacks.

Total crypto hacks by monthly sum, all-time chart. Source: DefiLlama

Hacking activity across the industry surged in April 2026, as malicious actors stole over $634 million from cryptocurrency platforms, the highest monthly total since the Bybit hack, which helped drive losses to roughly $1.4 billion in February 2025, according to DefiLlama data.

Advances in AI-assisted vulnerability discovery have raised concerns across the crypto security industry. New models such as Claude Opus 4.8 and ChatGPT 5.5 have contributed to what Mitchell Amador, CEO of bug bounty platform Immunefi, described as a “vulnerability apocalypse” for the crypto industry.

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