Frontier AI Access Denied: Crypto Firms Left Behind

Crypto companies are eagerly seeking access to advanced AI models, but only a select few have gained entry. US crypto exchange Coinbase secured access to Anthropic's restricted Mythos model in June, and Zcash's Zooko Wilcox reported that Anthropic used the model to audit the Zcash protocol at the request of Shielded Labs.

Binance's chief security officer Jimmy Su acknowledged that they have been trying to obtain access to frontier AI models like Mythos but have not been successful yet. Su stated, 'That's one advanced frontier model that hasn't been made available to crypto just yet.'

The uneven access creates a new security divide in the industry, where exploits can put billions of dollars at risk. While model developers like Anthropic and OpenAI restrict their most cyber-capable models from the public, there are concerns that increasingly powerful open-source alternatives mean crypto firms are left to deal with sophisticated AI-assisted attacks without the most capable tools to defend against them.

Crypto security executives interviewed by Cointelegraph agreed that there is likely a need to initially restrict access to frontier cyber models but said continuing to gate them becomes harder to justify once publicly available models approach the same capabilities.