Buterin says AI identified anonymous Ethereum proposal
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- Vitalik Buterin confirmed AI correctly identified his anonymous contribution to an Ethereum proposal.
- The successful analysis matched his reasoning style despite efforts to disguise the document through translation.
- The experiment highlights how AI could make anonymous contributions more difficult in open-source blockchain development.
Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed that AI-assisted analysis correctly identified his anonymous contribution to an Ethereum Improvement Proposal after a two-week public challenge.
The challenge followed Buterin's June 22 experiment testing whether modern AI tools could identify anonymous authors, despite his attempt to conceal the document by writing it in Chinese before translating it into English.
“Notice that the stylistic hints that his AI picked up on were intellectual habits and style of math and algorithm explanation, which bypassed my obfuscation strategy (which only covered prose) completely,” said Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Co-Invest chief executive Franklyn Wang identified Buterin as the most likely author of an anonymous December 2024 rewrite of EIP-7503 with roughly 20% confidence, about 10 times higher than the next-ranked candidate after analysing 27 documents.
The findings highlight the growing ability of AI to identify authors through reasoning patterns rather than writing style alone, and no market reaction accompanied the announcement.
The experiment follows a February study by researchers at ETH Zurich and Anthropic, which concluded that large language models can identify pseudonymous online users more effectively than traditional deanonymisation methods.
While Wang previously worked on a project using GPT-4 to identify Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) creator Satoshi Nakamoto through writing analysis, collaborator Vladimir Novakovski said that effort did not produce a high-confidence result.
At the time of reporting, Ethereum price was $1,776.06.
