Bitcoin Red Team founder turns to Chinese AI: ‘It absolutely guts me’

Bitcoin Red Team has now found 1,288 critical and high-level vulnerabilities in the Bitcoin ecosystem as of Saturday.

A Bitcoin security researcher says he has been forced to go back to using open-source Chinese AI models after finding himself restricted from analyzing further codebases by OpenAI, highlighting a growing concern that the most capable AI tools aren’t being made available to defenders. 

In an X post on Tuesday, AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton said he had begun integrating OpenAI’s Trust & Cyber capabilities into his Bitcoin Red Team work on Saturday, only to find his access restricted the following morning. 

“It absolutely guts me as a patriotic American to have to do this, but I will be going back to using Chinese open source models to conduct my research to protect Bitcoin infrastructure,” he added. 

Bitcoin Red Team, a group of volunteers, has been using AI tools and human review to scan hundreds of open-source Bitcoin-related repositories for vulnerabilities, with efforts accelerating days after the Coldcard hardware wallet hack, which has seen over $100 million in Bitcoin stolen. 

Last month, crypto executives told Cointelegraph that many of crypto’s biggest players are still waiting to gain access to powerful new AI models to strengthen their code from attacks, with only a select few having been able to get it.  

“I am now prevented from being able to continue the investigation in a further effort to make sure their code changes are sufficient, as well as understand if there are other issues that have yet to be discovered,” said Hamilton. 

“Black hats will not hit these issues. The white hats will. We’ve hit a local minima in policy,” said Hamilton. “Intelligence is unrestricted for those who don’t follow rules, and those who engage in harm reduction are left on the sidelines.” 

Related: Crypto firms still seeking frontier AI access; only select few have it

• Hacks
• AI
• Cybersecurity
• Scams & Cybercrime