On September 17, Vitalik Buterin stated that the claim that AI hackers will render cybersecurity obsolete is incorrect. He reminded that 90% of his wealth remains in cryptocurrency and argued that AI-supported formal verification can help prove that software meets established security requirements. According to Buterin, the Ethereum security team is already using AI agents to check the protocol code and independently reproduce vulnerabilities. According to Anthropic, advanced AI can accelerate attacks, while their models have identified thousands of vulnerabilities.
In his message on platform X, Buterin disagreed with the opinion that "AI-driven hacks mean that cybersecurity is doomed." He believes that those who continue to hold cryptocurrency imply that reliable digital systems can withstand stronger automated attacks. He described formal verification as a technique that uses mathematical specifications and proofs to assess software, claiming that a sufficiently powerful AI could help prove that "this program is safe," even if the software itself is complex. Buterin noted that formal verification could benefit defenders if it defines what properties the system must satisfy.
He also stated that the development of formal verification has become part of the current research program of the Ethereum protocol. On September 7, the Ethereum Foundation announced that formal verification will be used in various areas of its long-term research, including privacy and post-quantum security. In this context, researchers have already begun combining AI agents with machine-checkable proofs.
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