More than three dozen bitcoin and crypto companies have asked the largest AI labs to grant open-source security researchers early access to their most capable models, arguing that the entities defending a trillion dollars of infrastructure are working with significantly weaker tools than those attacking it.
The letter, organized 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 other entities, alongside nonprofit developer funds including Brink, Chaincode, and Btrust.
Their central complaint is that Bitcoin Core developers, the small group responsible for maintaining the software running the network, are excluded from the programs that the labs run for trusted security partners.
When these firms turn to publicly available models instead, the safety filters that prevent the creation of malware also block the work of finding vulnerabilities before criminals do.
This leaves them on open-weight models, which are freely downloadable and generally less capable.
Attackers face no such constraints. The letter notes that the labs and a handful of partners can observe new offensive capabilities months before anyone else, with those capabilities spreading through public models, unauthorized access to corporate systems, and purpose-built hacking tools.