Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called for rethinking how cryptocurrencies and AI should come together, warning that an increasing focus on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) risks missing the bigger picture.
In a post on
Instead of racing to build more powerful AI systems, he says the goal should be to guide AI development in a way that protects human freedom, distributes power more evenly, and avoids both extreme AI risks and everyday security failures.
Buterin outlines a near-term vision in which Ethereum plays an important, though not exclusive, role as an infrastructure for AI. This includes tools that allow people to interact with AI models more privately, reducing the need to rely on centralized providers. For example, running models locally, making anonymous payments for AI services, and using cryptography to verify how AI systems behave.
It also describes Ethereum as a way for AI systems to coordinate economically, allowing bots to pay other bots, post security deposits, build reputations, and resolve disputes without relying on a single company. Coupled with artificial intelligence tools that help people evaluate decisions and outcomes, Buterin argues that these systems could make long-debated ideas, such as decentralized governance, work on a real-world scale.
“For me, Ethereum, and my own vision of how our civilization should do AGI, is precisely about choosing a positive direction rather than adopting an undifferentiated acceleration of the arrow,” Buterin wrote in X.
Read more: ‘You’re not scaling Ethereum’: Vitalik Buterin throws a tough reality check to the largest crypto networks
