Bitcoin OG goes full doomer: "We have lost control" — AI may eat banks before regulators blink 🤖

Hut 8 co-founder Marc van der Chijs has shifted from bitcoin miner to AI investor and, increasingly, to an AI skeptic. "I have become more of a doomer over the past week, to be honest," he told CoinDesk, adding that competition between companies and nations is pushing the technology past human oversight. "We have lost control, actually. And until we get the control back, I am actually worried that we are moving too fast," he said.

Van der Chijs, who entered the bitcoin market in 2013 and co-founded Hut 8 (HUT), said he sold much of his bitcoin to invest in AI and now prefers AI data centers over bitcoin mining. He still considers bitcoin the best asset to hold for life, describing the $BTC network as more resilient than exchanges or other businesses built around it, which he views as more vulnerable to AI-driven disruption.

His concerns echo those of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has urged tech leaders to slow frontier AI development and warned that AI models recursively improving themselves could outpace human control and cause widespread infrastructure damage. Both point to a structural race in which unilateral restraint is penalized, making coordinated guardrails unlikely before a major incident.

Van der Chijs said he fears a serious disruption affecting financial systems or critical infrastructure may be required before governments cooperate. He said AI could expose vulnerabilities in legacy banking software, threatening confidence in institutions that depend on interconnected systems, and predicted that AI and robotics could eventually perform 90% to 95% of existing jobs while sharply reducing costs, forcing governments to consider new revenue sources such as taxes on robots or AI usage.

The entrepreneur's pivot illustrates how the line between crypto infrastructure and AI infrastructure is blurring for early bitcoin holders, with former miners repurposing capacity for AI workloads and reallocating capital between the two sectors.