Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Says AI Won’t Doom Crypto Security

In brief

• Vitalik Buterin rejected the idea that AI-powered hacking means cybersecurity is doomed.
• He argued that AI could make formal verification practical across entire software systems.
• The comments build on Ethereum’s push toward AI-assisted security, privacy, STARKs, and quantum resistance.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says AI does not spell the end of cybersecurity, arguing instead that advanced models could help make crypto software harder to break.

In a Wednesday post on X, Buterin argued that AI will not give hackers an insurmountable advantage, adding that crypto holders—including himself, with roughly 90% of his net worth in crypto—are betting that security defenses can keep pace.

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“It’s an increasingly common take that AI hacking means cybersecurity is doomed,” Buterin wrote. “I disagree. I think cybersecurity is naturally defense-favoring once people get their shit together.”

Buterin argued that AI could make formal verification—the use of mathematical proofs to establish that software is secure—practical even for complex systems.

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

In other words, Buterin believes AI sophisticated enough to solve famously difficult mathematical problems could also prove that even complex software meets clearly defined security requirements.

That does not mean, however, that security is easy, he said. The hard part is defining what “secure” means in the first place.

Blockchain developers are increasingly using AI agents to scan code, test exploits, and verify bugs before attackers can act, with researchers uncovering vulnerabilities in both and .