Vitalik Buterin Rejects Claim That AI Hacking Can Break Cybersecurity & Crypto, But There’s a Catch

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin pushed back against a claim that AI-powered hacking can weaken cybersecurity. He believes the same advances that help hackers can also help defenders, but only if the industry changes how it builds software.

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Ethereum’s Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Says AI Will Favor Cybersecurity, Not Hacking

Vitalik Buterin disagrees with the claim that “AI hacking means cybersecurity is doomed.” He argued that cybersecurity is “naturally defense-favoring once people get their shit together.”

He added that anyone still holding crypto is already aligned with betting on a blockchain cybersecurity boom in the coming years. Buterin pointed out that almost 90% of his net worth remains in crypto.

He argued that “If AI can prove Navier-Stokes and FLT, then AI can prove the statement ‘this program is secure’ as a mathematical theorem. Even if the program is very complicated.”

This would shift security to staying way ahead to find bugs before attackers do. It would also help build systems that are harder to break in the first place.

The catch is what “secure” actually means. Vitalik Buterin said the word hides several risks, including forged messages, server compromise, key leaks, and others.

Vitalik Buterin added that definitions of security can also run to more than a thousand lines and still miss something important. He thinks teams can no longer verify only the parts they consider security as critical. Modern AI makes it possible and necessary to verify the entire program.

He revealed that Ethereum is taking this approach to secure and strengthen the whole ecosystem over the next few years. Without doing this, he said, blockchains that want both scalability and privacy will not have a future.

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AI Can’t Crash Crypto and Break Blockchain Security

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s latest comments follow traditional finance experts’ claims that crypto could crash. He disagreed with Silicon Valley angel investor and AI-risk commentator Liron Shapira’s claim that AI will undermine Bitcoin’s security and can crash the price by 50% in the next two years.

While not everyone agrees with Buterin’s argument, calling cybersecurity naturally defense-favoring is itself a broader claim. The unseen risks to crypto from AI and quantum are still there.

Vitalik Buterin responded, “Yeah we pretty much have to do the hard thing, and push the open source, secure and verifiable paradigm up and down the full stack, including operating systems and including hardware.” Noting, the catch is that developers and security teams have to move fast to secure the blockchains.

Ethereum price is trading almost 2% higher at $2,440 today. Ethereum Foundation targets Layer 1 becoming quantum-resistant by 2029.