40+ crypto firms including Coinbase and MARA demand AI labs grant vetted defenders access to frontier models after H1 2026 blockchain losses hit $956M.
More than 40 cryptocurrency companies published an open letter on Aug. 10 asking frontier AI laboratories to give vetted Bitcoin security researchers controlled access to their most capable models. The Bitcoin Policy Institute coordinated the request, which names infrastructure securing over $1 trillion in value.
The letter, titled “Defenders Need the Frontier,” argues that publicly available AI systems impose safety restrictions that block legitimate cybersecurity research. Open-source maintainers are forced to rely on weaker open-weight models while sophisticated attackers face no comparable constraints, Bitcoin.com News reported.
Signatories include Block, Coinbase, Strategy, MARA, Galaxy, BitGo, Blockstream, Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, Bitwise, Kraken, Ledger, Foundry, Trezor, BTCPay Server, and developer groups such as Brink, Chaincode Labs, OpenSats, and Btrust.
The coalition asked for early access to frontier cybersecurity models, dedicated computing capacity, a secure research environment, and direct channels with AI lab security teams, according to crypto.news.
“Frontier AI is changing the economics of both security research and cyber operations,” the letter stated. The signatories did not call for unrestricted public access. They proposed “standing trusted-access programs for qualified defenders of open-source financial infrastructure,” in which researchers pass a vetting process before receiving capabilities restricted from the general public.
The numbers behind the request are substantial. SlowMist recorded 182 blockchain security incidents in the first half of 2026, resulting in approximately $956 million in losses, the firm’s mid-year report showed. That compares with 121 incidents and $2.37 billion in losses during the same period in 2025. Incident frequency rose roughly 50% even as average loss per event fell sharply.
The letter followed weeks of hands-on work by the Bitcoin Red Team, a volunteer group led by Calle who used AI models alongside manual review to scan open-source repositories.
Bitcoin Red Team contributor Calle posted on X on Aug. 13 that the effort produced revelations, describing it as “a massive collision between decades of human open source slop against 2 weeks of kimi k3,” Cryptopolitan reported. Kimi is built by the Chinese AI lab Moonshot.
Separately, an Ethereum Foundation study in July used coordinated AI agents to surface genuine vulnerabilities in Ethereum software, including a libp2p flaw later disclosed as CVE-2026-34219. That precedent demonstrated AI can find real bugs in production blockchain code, not merely theoretical weaknesses.
TRM Labs provided a parallel data point, counting 207 incidents and $972 million in losses during the same H1 2026 period, confirming the high-frequency, lower-severity trend.
No leading AI laboratory had publicly announced a program responding to the coalition’s specific requests at the time of publication.
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