Artificial intelligence (AI) and the cryptocurrency ecosystem continue to collide. The former is a double-edged sword that serves as both a development and potential exploitative tool.
Big tech players like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Grok Founder Elon Musk have been persistently raising the alarm over the pace of their growth.
However, US President Donald Trump has now rejected the calls for AI guardrails. He says all the industry needs is a “STRONG AND SMART PRESIDENT,” which it already has. He adds that his administration proactively regulates and prevents AI from “doing bad things.” Armodei’s warnings of a malevolent AI, according to Trump, are just pretentious.
Even more, he reiterates that America leads China and the world in AI, and that its position will not be threatened by “sick” conspiracy theorists.
Vice President JD Vance concurred, calling the regulatory pleas a “Trojan horse.” Likewise, China has rejected the calls to slow down AI development, labeling them simply as fear-mongering.
AI policy implications for crypto and DeFi #
While white hat developers work ethically, threat actors operate boundlessly, creating an asymmetric warfare in which attackers are winning. In the case of Zcash, an ethical developer used AI to discover a counterfeiting vulnerability in its code. Events would have unfolded quite differently if the developer were a black hat. An AI agent would also have independently exploited the vulnerability, as was the case with Hugging Face.
Another consequence of AI in crypto is hyperrealistic phishing and deepfakes, as was the case with Patrick Hillman, the Chief Communications Officer of Binance.
Even more, the technology could be used to perpetrate pump-and-dump schemes by publishing fake news and sentiment.
The danger narrative is inflated #
According to investor Michael Burry, who is famous for predicting and profiting from the 2008 financial crisis, AI danger is overblown as a marketing tactic. It is also a cover for the industry’s decelerating growth and fierce competition.
Still, more and more companies continue to build and deploy AI models, the latest being Facebook’s Muse agent, which acts as a personal assistant.