A coalition of Bitcoin policy bodies, digital asset companies, and cybersecurity organizations has published an open letter urging frontier AI laboratories to grant trusted, early access to advanced models for defenders of open-source financial infrastructure. Released on August 10 under the title “Defenders Need the Frontier,” the letter argues that cutting-edge AI is fundamentally altering the economics of both security research and cyberattacks, accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities across critical systems.
The signatories—which include Strategy, Bitwise, Ledger, Galaxy, MARA, Blockstream, Trezor, Strike, River, and Kraken—note that open-source software underpins financial infrastructure securing trillions of dollars. The Bitcoin network alone protects over one trillion dollars in value, while the broader digital asset ecosystem depends on openly developed wallets, cryptographic libraries, node software, custody systems, and payment networks. For millions of users, the letter stresses, a single vulnerability can jeopardize retirement savings, business capital, and family wealth. The bearer nature of many digital assets can compress the interval between compromise and irreversible loss, making proactive vulnerability detection especially critical.
The letter draws attention to a growing imbalance between attackers and defenders. Sophisticated adversaries, including potential foreign actors, are reportedly already leveraging advanced AI to sustain offensive campaigns at a pace that small open-source teams struggle to absorb. The Bitcoin Policy Institute has received independent reports describing sustained, AI-assisted activity that diverts scarce maintainer resources from development and routine security work. Meanwhile, qualified defenders such as Bitcoin Core developers often lack access to lab cyber access programs and find their legitimate security work obstructed by guardrails on publicly available frontier systems, forcing reliance on less capable open-weight alternatives.
To close this gap, the coalition requests that AI labs establish or expand standing trusted-access programs providing pre-release access to the strongest cyber-capable models, sufficient compute for comprehensive security audits, secure environments for analyzing embargoed code, and direct channels for coordinated disclosure. The letter explicitly calls for eligibility to include small, nonprofit, and independent maintainers—not just large corporations and governments.
The initiative positions frontier AI as a potentially decisive defensive asset, provided that infrastructure guardians can preview emerging capabilities before they are weaponized. The digital asset industry has committed to helping identify credible participants and coordinate remediation, signaling a collective recognition that proactive hardening of open-source financial systems is preferable to post-breach recovery.
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