Crypto executives say restricting powerful AI models may initially be justified, but it doesn’t make sense as open-source alternatives become more capable.
Many of crypto’s biggest players are still waiting to gain access to powerful new AI models to strengthen their code from attacks, with only a select few having been able to get it.
US crypto exchange Coinbase said in June that it had secured access to Anthropic’s restricted Mythos model and Zcash’s Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic used the model to audit the Zcash protocol at the request of Shielded Labs, while other major crypto players are seemingly yet to get access.
“That’s one advanced frontier model that hasn’t been made available to crypto just yet,” Binance’s chief security officer Jimmy Su told Cointelegraph. “We have been trying to make inroads there. We also talked to other crypto exchanges and our own investors to try to make some progress. But we haven’t gotten the most frontier AI model, like Mythos.”
The uneven access creates a new security divide in an industry where exploits can put billions of dollars at risk. While model developers like Anthropic and OpenAI have chosen to 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.
Anthropic says Mythos 5 uses the same underlying model as its publicly available Fable 5, but without safeguards that restrict sensitive cybersecurity work.
OpenAI operates a similar tiered system: verified defenders can use GPT-5.5 with “Trusted Access for Cyber,” while its more permissive GPT-5.5-Cyber model is reserved for a smaller group conducting authorized penetration testing.
Crypto security executives interviewed by Cointelegraph said 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.
Su said Anthropic’s controlled rollout is a responsible approach because newly released models may benefit attackers faster than defenders.
“If it enhances the attacker much faster than the defender, then it actually is harming the ecosystem,” he said, adding that a limited testing period could reduce the potential “blast radius.”
Related: Can AI drain DeFi? Separating Claude Mythos hype from reality
However, Su said this calculation changes when competing models become more powerful and widely available.
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