Summary
- More than three dozen bitcoin and crypto firms are urging major AI labs to give open-source security researchers early access to their most powerful models, arguing defenders are using weaker tools than attackers.
- The letter, organized by the Bitcoin Policy Institute and signed by companies including Coinbase, Block and ARK Invest, says Bitcoin Core developers are locked out of trusted-partner programs and hampered by safety filters on public models.
- Recent exploits against BTCPay Server and Lightning nodes, uncovered in part by an AI-powered volunteer “Bitcoin Red Team,” underscore the signatories call for early model access, compute resources, secure testing environments and direct channels to lab security teams.
More than three dozen bitcoin and crypto companies have asked the largest AI labs to give open-source security researchers early access to their most capable models, arguing that the people defending a trillion dollars of infrastructure are working with weaker tools than the people attacking it.
The letter, organised by the Bitcoin Policy Institute and published earlier this week is signed by Coinbase, Block, BitGo, Blockstream, Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, Bitwise, Foundry, Casa, Exodus and others, alongside nonprofit developer funds including Brink, Chaincode and Btrust.
Its central complaint is specific that Bitcoin Core developers, the small group maintaining the software that runs the network, cannot get into the programs labs run for trusted security partners.
When they turn to publicly available models instead, the safety filters designed to stop people writing malware also block the work of finding flaws before criminals do.
That leaves them on open-weight models, which are freely downloadable and generally less capable.
Attackers face none of those constraints. The letter said the labs and a handful of partners can see new offensive capabilities months before anyone else, while those capabilities spread anyway through public models, stolen access to corporate systems and purpose-built hacking tools.