The Ethereum co-founder said AI recognized his intellectual habits, ending a two-week public challenge to identify an anonymous contribution he made.
Vitalik Buterin has confirmed that AI-assisted analysis used by Co-Invest CEO Franklyn Wang correctly identified his anonymous contribution to an Ethereum proposal.
The identification comes two weeks after Buterin publicly challenged whether current AI tools could pierce online anonymity.
Wang's winning submission identified an anonymous rewrite of EIP-7503 by analyzing the way it explained mathematical and technical concepts.
“The doc was an anonymous EIP-7503 rewrite he'd hidden by writing it in Chinese and machine-translating it,” Wang wrote in a Monday X post after Buterin confirmed the result. “The tell wasn't his words, it was his reasoning.”
Vitalik Buterin's June 22 post challenging viewers to discover his anonymous writing. Source: Vitalik Buterin
Some of the crypto industry's most prominent contributors, including Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, have relied on pseudonyms to conceal their identities. Some analysts believe that if AI can reliably identify authors from their reasoning patterns, that would make anonymous technical contributions harder to sustain across open-source blockchain communities.
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In a February paper, researchers from ETH Zurich and Anthropic claimed large language models have made online deanonymization practical at scale.
The study found AI could identify pseudonymous online users by extracting identity-related information from unstructured text, searching for potential matches and reasoning over the most likely candidates, outperforming traditional deanonymization techniques.
“There have recently been claims that AI text analysis will make online anonymity untenable. So let me cannibalize a piece of my own anonymity to do an experiment,” Buterin said on June 22.
He confessed to publishing a document of “medium importance” to Ethereum at some point in the past decade under a different name.
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