Patriotic paradox: Bitcoin's white-hat defender ships the work to open-source Chinese AI 🇺🇸🔓

A Bitcoin security researcher said Tuesday that he has been forced to revert to Chinese open-source artificial intelligence models after losing access to OpenAI's Trust & Cyber capabilities just one day into using them for vulnerability research on $BTC infrastructure. AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton, who works with the volunteer group Bitcoin Red Team, said he had begun integrating the OpenAI tools on Saturday and was blocked from further analysis by Sunday morning. "It absolutely guts me as a patriotic American to have to do this, but I will be going back to using Chinese open source models to conduct my research to protect Bitcoin infrastructure," Hamilton wrote in an X post. "I am now prevented from being able to continue the investigation in a further effort to make sure their code changes are sufficient, as well as understand if there are other issues that have yet to be discovered," he added.

Bitcoin Red Team has been pairing AI tools with human review to scan hundreds of open-source Bitcoin-related repositories for vulnerabilities, an effort the group accelerated after the recent Coldcard hardware wallet hack, which has seen more than $100 million in $BTC stolen. The disclosure comes weeks after crypto executives told Cointelegraph that many of the industry's largest firms remain unable to access the most capable new AI models for code defense, with only a select few having secured such access. Hamilton framed the restriction as a misalignment of policy rather than capability, arguing that defensive researchers are being sidelined while adversaries face no such limits. "Black hats will not hit these issues. The white hats will. We've hit a local minima in policy," he said. "Intelligence is unrestricted for those who don't follow rules, and those who engage in harm reduction are left on the sidelines."

The episode adds to a broader debate over how frontier AI systems are allocated to security researchers working on open-source cryptocurrency code, an area where defenders say delays in access can directly translate into unpatched vulnerabilities. Hamilton did not name the specific Chinese open-source models he plans to use, and OpenAI has not publicly commented on the individual case.