Vitalik Buterin outlines Ethereum role in artificial intelligence and privacy

In a post on X on 9 February 2026, Buterin wrote that his long-term view is for AI to empower people rather than replace them, while the near-term opportunity lies in practical integrations. He described a future where users can interact with AI systems in ways that are both trustless and private, without leaking sensitive data or tying activity to real-world identities.

Buterin pointed to work he considers necessary to make that possible, including running large language models locally on personal devices, using zero-knowledge proofs to make anonymous API calls, and improving cryptographic methods that can verify claims about AI outputs. He argued that stronger privacy and verifiability could reduce the damage from data leaks and from increasingly sophisticated scams.

He also described AI agents acting as intermediaries between users and blockchains. In that setup, bots could review and simulate transactions, audit smart-contract code, interact with decentralized applications and flag risks before a user signs. Buterin wrote that this could bring the cypherpunk ideal of verifying everything closer to reality by shifting the heavy lifting from humans to LLMs.

Finally, Buterin argued that Ethereum could serve as an economic layer for AI-to-AI interactions, with agents paying each other for services, handling API calls and posting security deposits, while also improving markets and governance. He wrote that prediction markets and decentralized decision-making are limited by human attention, and that LLMs could scale judgment enough to revisit those ideas in practice.

As GNcrypto wrote on 24 November 2025, Buterin and other crypto executives criticized X for rolling out a country label feature that can display where an account is based, warning that non-consensual location disclosure without a clear opt-out could expose users to privacy risks. X product head Nikita Bier framed the panel as a transparency tool, while critics argued that even generalized location data can be combined with other signals to target users.