AI Fails to Catch $130M Bug in Bitcoin Wallet Hack
A Canada-based company called Coinkite has revealed that artificial intelligence failed to detect a bug in their Bitcoin wallet software, which hackers exploited to steal an estimated $130 million. The hack occurred in late last week and affected Coldcard wallets, considered one of the safest ways to store digital tokens.
The vulnerability was found in the part of the firmware where two separate software components interact, not in the parent code or cryptographic logic that are subject to most reviews.
Coinkite warned other companies building Bitcoin hardware and software to undertake immediate reviews, especially those using AI to monitor security-critical code. The company has tested its code against several frontier AI models and found that none of them caught the vulnerability.
Nikhil Raghuveera, CEO of Predicate, a blockchain compliance infrastructure provider, expressed concerns about self-custody in crypto, stating that 'one point of failure can shake trust in the whole model.'