TL;DR:
- The Bitcoin Policy Institute and crypto sector companies asked AI labs for early access to frontier models for network developers.
- The letter warns that without dedicated programs, open-source advocates cannot compete with criminals already using advanced AI.
- In April 2026, hacks in the crypto industry exceeded $634 million, the highest monthly total since the Bybit hack in February 2025.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) published an open letter in which a group of companies and organizations from the crypto sector urges leading artificial intelligence laboratories to offer early access to their frontier models to Bitcoin and open-source developers. The document warns that these advocates face a specific problem: the guardrails of available public systems frequently block them, leaving them dependent on open-weight models with lower capabilities.
The letter was co-signed by organizations and companies such as the African Bitcoin Institute, Anchorage Digital, BitGo, Bitwise, Blockstream, Bull Bitcoin, MARA, Kraken, Ledger, and Trezor, among others. The signatories requested that laboratories “establish or expand trusted access programs for qualified defenders of open-source financial infrastructure.”
The Crypto Industry Needs the Best Defense Tools
The text argues that open-source software underpins critical digital and financial infrastructure, and that Bitcoin alone safeguards more than $1 trillion in value. Under that argument, a vulnerability in that infrastructure can put the lifetime savings of millions of people at risk.
According to the BPI, AI is transforming the economics of security research because advanced models can traverse large codebases, identify potential weaknesses, and accelerate the most complex technical work, for both defenders and adversaries. The institute indicated that it received multiple independent reports from open-source maintainers describing sophisticated actors, including possible foreign adversaries, using advanced AI capabilities to sustain attacks persistently.
The current state of the crypto industry defines the urgency of the request on its own. In April 2026, hackers stole more than $634 million from cryptocurrency platforms, the highest monthly total since the Bybit hack in February 2025, which drove losses of approximately $1.4 billion, according to DefiLlama data. Models such as Claude Opus 4.8 and ChatGPT 5.5 contributed to what Mitchell Amador, CEO of the Immunefi platform, described as a “vulnerability apocalypse” for the industry.
