AI Safety Researcher Warns Bitcoin Security Will Be Nearly Impossible to Guarantee in Advanced AI Era

AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy said Monday that advanced AI could threaten Bitcoin's security.

Bitcoin Security at Risk?

In an interview with entrepreneur and investor Anthony Pompliano, Yampolskiy explored the relationship between AI and Bitcoin.

"Essentially, AI lives on the internet," he said. "The massive amount of mining activity on Bitcoin may have created a hardware surplus for us to train capable AI models. So there seems to be a deep connection between the two."

However, Yampolskiy warned that "advanced" AI systems could become "really great hackers" and be highly efficient at social engineering attacks.

"So I think for the average person, it will become almost impossible to keep their Bitcoin safe," he added.

Yampolskiy, a computer science professor at the University of Louisville, said that with sophisticated AI, there will always be something watching and tracking your internet activity.

"You might see fake videos, fake audio, people you know telling you to do something. You can't reliably confirm that who you're connecting with on a website isn't a deepfake or recently generated content," he said. "It's a more difficult environment to avoid being scammed in."

AI as a "Threat" to Bitcoin?

Yampolskiy's concerns are not unfounded.

Stephanie Talamantez, a former FBI agent and current security expert, said in June that North Korean hackers have escalated from simple hacking activities to sophisticated social engineering techniques to target prominent cryptocurrency companies.

Economist Peter Schiff has also said that "powerful" AI could "discover" vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's code, cryptography, or cybersecurity. His argument: AI is not bullish on Bitcoin but rather poses a threat to it.

A report from on-chain analytics firm Chainalysis found that AI-driven cryptocurrency scams were 4.5 times more profitable than traditional scams in 2025.

On the other hand, cryptocurrency companies like Binance are using AI-driven tools and models to combat AI-driven scams. The platform said that over half of its fraud control measures are powered by AI.

Price action: At the time of writing, BTC is trading at $80,507.29, up 4.09% over the past 24 hours, according to