Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum could play a central role in shaping how artificial intelligence develops, positioning crypto as a privacy, verification, and economic layer to support decentralised AI systems.
In a post on X, Buterin said his long-term vision sees AI empowering humans rather than replacing them, while near-term use cases focus on practical integrations between AI and blockchain infrastructure.
“Basically, take the vision that cypherpunk radicals have always dreamed of (don’t trust; verify everything), that has been nonviable in reality because humans are never actually going to verify all the code ourselves,”
Buterin said.
Buterin outlined four key areas of overlap, including private and trustless AI interactions, Ethereum acting as an economic layer for AI-to-AI activity, onchain verification using AI, and improvements to markets and governance efficiency.
He highlighted the growing risks of data leakage from large language models and argued for tooling such as local AI deployment, zero-knowledge proofs for anonymous API calls, and stronger cryptographic verification of AI outputs.
Buterin also said AI agents could act as intermediaries for users, auditing transactions, interacting with decentralised applications, and helping counter increasingly sophisticated crypto scams.
Looking ahead, he argued AI could strengthen onchain governance and prediction markets by overcoming human limits to attention and decision-making, making decentralised systems more functional at scale.
At the time of reporting, Ethereum price was $2,047.15.