Topic: Will AIs steal Bitcoin? An Experiment (Read 598 times)

This is a wild experiment but honestly why even risk it? AI platforms weren't made for storing crypto and even if nothing happens now, who knows how this data is handled in the future? If the coins go missing, it'll be a lesson in never sharing sensitive info even with AI. Either way, I wouldn't bet my BTC on it!!

Exactly, the blockchain is written in codes. Alphabet and numbers and what the entire internet understand are the prompt from the codes giving. An Ai will not go beyond some certain limit unless the operator has assigned that as a task for it to complete. For something like this to happen, a human must be involved to push any authorization and if there is a bridge he can write new prompt that will pass that step. Humans can do a lot of things, AI is somehow limit to what humans can do because they rely on the information fed to them by Humans.

AI without an operator will give a normal result. But with the help of a woman anything is nearly possible.

Even if no coins go missing, this experiment doesn't mean AI is safe for storing sensitive data. The fact that the AI recognized the seed phrase is concerning enough. If I were Matteo, I'd also consider whether his own system is fully secure before drawing conclusions. Crypto security should always be offline–cold storage is the way to go.

Who knows. nullama was right, though. All the addresses except for one were not funded at the time of his post and when I last checked them on the blockchain after seeing his reply. It's also true that users on X informed Matteo that the addresses he posted have 0 bitcoin, and he never came back to address those people or to tell them that the coins are elsewhere and he just made a mistake posting the wrong BTC addresses. He is still silent on the issue.

Why lie though? Anyone could have checked (which obviously someone had) so what would be the point of this? Maybe it was really just an honest mistake.

I had a thought that maybe sharing the address would motivate others to invest in this research he is doing but then I realized if people do send out bitcoin to the researcher's addresses, the bitcoins might be stolen by him before AI tech companies do lol. Certainly if someone brought this experiment up and asked for some donations, no one would have believed him and this would end up in a BEWARE post.

Whoever you are, please do not quote me when you decide to shitpost. If you have something constructive to post, then feel free to quote me and expect me to answer. Otherwise you are going to waste your time and bring some attention to your account and your alternative accounts. I am not the one who will do something bad, but your chance of joining the campaign will become slim if you continue to shitpost. These random word salad do not deserve to be rewarded.

Now this is an interesting topic and its something I have thought about on several occasions. Mostly I think though that if there is going to be an AI to steal crypto it will be developed by a Threat Actor Group and utilized on larger scale operations. This already happens today with some input from TAs already and AI has really turned a Junior hacker into a Varsity Hacker/Professional hacker as well.

It will go missing if somehow the image is also being trained on the upcoming LLM model, if not, then nobody gonna get it, also new LLM already give a safety measure for something confidential like this, I bet his money won't go missing but there's always a chance that something happen knowing that the data could very well be seen by the AI developers I guess.

LLM doesn't store your data in their model, the company does, and they only retrieve your conversation from their database, but there might be some LLM or agentic AI that is created for stealing people's money by executing some code maybe it's possible.
at least that's what I know.

Yes, it would be, but I think I remember reading something like this already happened.

Im not sure if the algorithm would be able to automatically sort the data with 100% accuracy. There could be some errors, and some data that should be private could be released.

I do not think that any coins will go missing. But I do think that giving AI your seed is a novel way of getting your wallet hacked

AI can’t steal the coins because programs do not have use for money but humans do. I’m sure if he had deposited a reasonable amount of money in those wallets, someone would have moved them by now. I think everyone will agree that $10 bitcoins is not worth the damage to a brand name.

Well, if it's there's a faulty in the AI system then many people will be able to access it but if isn't then it's exactly what you said however, if what I said in my previous post means that people will be able to steal the bitcoin. It's still better not to depend on AI or something the same although if the one who did the experiment willing to take the risk and can afford to lose the funds used for the experiment then I'd love to know the result of it.

But if someone did that, then it would be easy to find who did it.
The people who have access to AI chatbots' database are not countless.
Therefore, a simple investigation would easily lead to the breach.

I don't think the AI will tamper with his assets using the phrase. However, I have always been conscious of the fact that these bots are managed by someone. Information is also gathered , and saved by the bots and from the bots, remember? Those maintaining the AI might access information, if they want to...am just thinking. So it's not entirely safe, I think.

Even though we don't know if the experimenter will give us accurate findings and not alter his findings. I strongly will stick to what I think is safe for me.

AI won't steal the coins but if a person was able to get the details of the wallet from the AI like if there's a loophole that will make the AI reveal the seed phrase then it's possible that a human will steal whatever is in the wallet. The question is, does the AI reveal the seed phrase to a human who used the AI and make it reveal the seed phrase. Anyway, I don't know how the AI system works but as I have read that the AI will clear itself like the inquiries and others.

The last time I checked AI's don't store people's questions or inquiries in a way that can be recalled identified, after every active session the Al clears itself so I doubt there will be possibility of stealing any of the coin from the different wallets used for this experiment. AI only uses the data generated from our inquiry to retrain it's model.

With this said if the AI doesn't store questions or inquiries then there will be no information in the database for the db engineers overseeing the AI to steal from.

The experiment is actually an empty one and we saw that the coin in DeepSeek hasn't been spent it's still intact in the UXTO. Which can a hypothetical conclusion that AI won't steal our coin neither can the db engineers but it's not worth risking our seed phrase as well

ai technology works by reading the database it has, but depending on the prompt from the user, ai can respond by giving seed phrases or not at all. so we need to see who can make the right prompt to get the seed phrases from the database, and i'm also curious about who successfully did that.

Yeah that fits and is right and it makes sense if we think about it. if there is only personal as his personal thesis. AI app just good at generating and not set for bad things in my opinion..

Matteo's experiment is thought provoking but there are too many unknown factors, his device security, seed generation process and whether the AIs retain data. If a wallet is drained, it could be from an entirely different vulnerability. Regardless of the outcome, the safest approach is to never share a seed phrase with any digital platform, AI or otherwise. I'll be watching the results with interest.

I don't doubt this is possible if you create an AI agent who has deep access to a Large Language Model. However, the LLM itself would not be able imo because this is not what it was designed for. It is designed to react to human queries.

What would be needed is some kind of "fake consciousness". This looks like some ultra-advanced sci-fi but would be simply a routine regularly executing certain kinds of queries. It has to be trained to query the LLM to reach certain goals.

I think the current state of technology doesn't allow such an auto-query process covering most aspects of human life or even the field of a professional worker, as this would be very close to an "AGI" already. But a "specialist fake consciousness", e.g. a program all the time trying to create and improve ways to earn cryptocurrencies, would be probably possible.

One could for example start first with some kind of trading bot and then improve it giving it more information/context about ways how crypto can be earned. The next step would be to let him discover new ways to earn, and finally, auto-improve this "game" until it becomes good enough to solve Pellegrini's "puzzle".

It seems at first difficult to set apart such an AI from a traditionally programmed program (humans simply tell them how to search for the data). However, as LLMs are very large and complex, it can be difficult to find such an algorithm traditionally, so some form of AI training would probably be needed for this kind of program/agent.

I don't think there is a way to verify this. We shouldn't just believe it because the company tells us that it's true. Corporations get caught lying all the time and data is money.

Good catch! Perhaps Matteo shared the wrong addresses. Seems like an amateur move to set all this up and then not fund the addresses with BTC at all. Seems weird if it's just attention seeking or some other motive behind it.

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Poll results so far:
Most people (10 or 76%) think that none of the coins will be stolen. Quite an expected result if you ask me. Two people have replied that all coins will be stolen and one person believes the seed shared with ChatGPT will be stolen.

Yep.
We won't know what agenda they would be pushing, only assumptions and speculations.
But for certain, they are in for the grants doing their work

I don't think anyone would risk some hefty amount just for research purposes. At least I am not that stupid. Sometimes big organizations spend millions of dollars for research purposes, but I don't think an individual will risk their own money just for doing some research from where they won't get any benefit. This research is also from an Individual and there is a high chance they can manipulate the result by moving their funds to some wallet. So, I don't think they are going to get any sponsor for their experiment.

This is an interesting experiment but I believe the real risk isn't the AI itself but potential human oversight or security flaws in data handling. If a wallet gets drained, it could mean the AI systems store or transmit data in ways we don't fully understand. Still, without knowing Matteo's full setup, I'd take the results with caution. Regardless, seed phrases should never be uploaded anywhere, better safe than sorry.

It would be really interesting to see if an AI is able to generate its own wallet and send the funds there.

But in reality, I think the most probable thing to happen is that the image, or the transcripts, will be stored or sent somewhere else, where some random human will be able to look at it.

These people could be labeling data, which is a very low paying job. If any of them know about Bitcoin, they would most certainly just take the BTC.

The sad part is that I don't think there's a way to differentiate the two (or even the OP simply moving the coins himself).

If anyone is interested, here are the addresses, from the OP link:

GROK:  
bc1qwwx366e5np98kf38lf3u0t5vv7kaym30myue6m

CHATGPT:
bc1q6p8dqrzsmvmtykrnmcktz2p78ly249pdnsxx4j

DEEPSEEK: bc1qulzjdn3z0pf2gfrzku0r3t5dgfzulfu0yykck9

GEMINI:
bc1qtz0rl22jrhjmxqm3j0ef7w3gr4j4uvkyf9hv04

PERPLEXITY:
bc1q5v4yelavycl4m32559sqq2xyxmtsg7mu8xstuh

Unfortunately, they all have 0 BTC, except for the DEEPSEEK one.

I don't think this is a properly setup experiment.

Yes, it's impossible to know if Matteo will be honest but so is impossible to know whether people behind AI would steal the coin or not if this accident wasn't publicly claimed. Now, since this news became popular, I think that people behind AI won't touch it but there might be some people paid lots of money to steal coins and damage the reputation of any AI that's included in the list.

It's really interesting experiment but I think that those addresses will be safe. AI itself won't steal Bitcoins, I don't believe that what we call an AI is an intelligence, it's a buzzword for marketing. Today, AI is just a combination of bunch of good algorithms, it's nothing sort of intelligence.

Of course, I'm sure there is such a "barrier", at least in theory.

However, LLMs habitually also learn from their user queries. I don't know how blurred the lines are and if and how "concrete" data snippets can leak into that "learning" algorithm. See for example this Forbes article about ChatGPT 4.

It would be an interesting variant to upload a private key or passphrase and, in the same prompt, clarify that the data should be "public" information and could/should be shown to other users. Then the task would be for the LLM users to make the AI leak that secret code.

Maybe I'll try that eventually, with some small Litecoin or XMR amounts using different kinds of wordings and "graduations" of "secrecy" ...

These AI models are not designed to act outside of it's codes, and hacking a Bitcoin wallet is an action outside of it's codes. Because though these A.I tools like Deepseek and ChatGPT may act, analyze and response to questions just like human, I doubt if they will able to execute a Bitcoin transaction from one wallet to another with the use of the available seed phrase that was uploaded without the interference of a human at it's back-end. Hence, the chance of Matteo Pellegrini's coins been stolen from it's different wallets are 2/10.

However, I was able to have a little conservation with ChatGPT about if the informations share could be accessible by a third party, and this is what it said "If you’re concerned about privacy, avoid sharing sensitive personal details. Let me know how I can help while respecting your privacy!" as shown in the image below.

   

As far as I think, the seed phrase won't be leaked because these AIs hold the memory until the session is active.
Our data in their memory gets cleared after an extended period of time or if the data becomes irrelevant.
It's supposed to be an automatic mechanism but if there are people who have direct access to the data sets then there might be a chance of getting the data leaked.
Although its just an experiment but why would anyone put their seed phrase on AI.

Sure thing, but I 'd like to maintain some privacy, so I will not give away to much information.

I will specifically talk about the AI software engineers, but there are many more professionals and experts in such companies, like DB administrators, lawyers, linguistic analysers, front-end and back-end software engineers, managers etc.

I 'll cover the day-to-day job of an AI engineer.

So the day-to-day life of an AI engineer in company XYZ, is:

1. improve the scraping mechanism that downloads data from the internet. Improve means bug fixes and feature additions.
2. incorporate fresh data into the existing datasets.
3. improve the existing datasets with new features. Could be column additions, or better word tokenisation, or even removing old data if they are deprecated.
4. improve the existing neural networks of the AI models. When adding new data, an AI engineer must make sure that the model will behave well with this data. They could add more layers (CNN, LSTM and many more) to the model, if needed. (note: more layers doesn't mean better model necessarily).
5. improve the existing datasets and models, based on users' feedback and interaction. Have you ever seen the "thumbs-up" icon at the end of each answer of AI chat bots? That's the feedback I am refering to.
6. based on users' questions, bots' answers and users' feedback, the engineer will try to teach the bot to respond better.

There are many more tasks that AI engineers have, but I will limit my answer here, because I think it's evident that people working in AI companies collect the data that the bot is asked. Obviously the bots train themselves as well, but there are always engineers behind them.

Disclaimer: I have a real company in mind, so if anyone from other companies do completely different things, I am not aware. But, most for companies it should be the same.

Did you try the AI-based password game I linked? Or anything similar to that? Because the conclusions from such experiments are simple: AIs are bad at keeping things secret, if things were passed to them in the same context.

Which means, that the most likely outcome, is that some AI-based website can have a bug, so user A can type some seed, and user B can receive it, after giving the right prompt.

Also, if user inputs are collected, and used to train new models, then new versions can have some seeds stored permanently (and because seeds are just dictionary words, and not some random characters, no complex tokens are needed to store them). It is already the case, when it comes to things like Windows product keys, which were processed during web crawling, and can be shared by AIs, when you jailbreak them.

People are doing it anyway. Even if some information is non-sensitive in a limited context, it can be sensitive, if you have more data, and you can figure out the missing part. For example: a lot of people use AIs to write their e-mails in a polite way. Which means, that those chatbots are full of information about internal meetings in such companies, the structure of the organization, and so on. Fortunately, such bots are not smart enough to use that data properly, but human users can trick those bots, to reveal such things.

By the way: from the cyber security perspective, finding the training data is an interesting challenge. For example: for some specific prompts, some AIs, used to generate images, returned almost unmodified pictures, which you can find online. Also, usually you can try changing default settings, and make those bots less noisy (for example by changing the temperature), and then, they are less creative, and sometimes just return whole pieces of mostly unmodified training data.

But these AIs don't have the ability to sensor this kind of information. Such a very obvious sensitive, for example, password or even these seed phrases, like whatever happens, don't give it as answer/response to anyone?

Anyway, prevention is better than cure. Even in our company which we common use AI daily, we are always telling not to share any sensitive information.

AI bots aren't 'operated' by humans in the strict meaning of that term. There isn't a person in the background telling the AI what to do and how to reply every time someone asks a question. But developers are always working on improving the responses, adding new data and information, and looking at what caused certain bugs or wrong and incomplete responses from user inputs. 

Would you be able to share more information about your experience with AIs and the everyday work that people are doing in the background which we, the users, don't see or know about?

Again, I will answer based on personal experience.

In the great majority of these AI bots, developers have full control over the data that are asked or transmitted.

The simplest way to ELI5 this is to think that whenever you log in in a chatbot, you have the full history of what you chatted about.

It's like working as a DB administrator in a financial institution. There are rules and policies, but developers have full access over the data.

AI cannot transfer funds on its own, but manual instructions will be required. Maybe this is a bug, maybe someone can gain access to the wallet through ChatGPT. ChatGPT is just an instruction. If AI cannot work on its own without any instructions from outside, then how will it transfer Bitcoin?

isn't the point of ai is that it isn't operated by humans? or at least it is very limited intervention by human resources so i do not know how much will humans see what is going on in their servers ai is created so that it can function without the need for anyone to be behind it so i also do not think they are keeping tabs on every single person who is using ai and uploading images at the very least maybe they just have something that would alert them if something unusual happens in the system
you are right maybe someone would have checked the wallet but decided not to do anything however will anyone be so willing to risk numbers of bitcoins for the sake of research or experiment??

AIs (for now) are just glorified search engines. They make it easier, can summarize, but in no way can they act upon something on their own.

Now a human handling these AIs (or the data they have), then maybe. But afaik employees shouldn't even be handling stuff like the data, at least at this point since they've already settled on the algorithms to be used. They'd only really be handling data directly IF it was on the really early stages, testing and stuff. Not to mention that even if they can read it, god knows where Chatgpt sorted it out lol.

Wouldn't the algorithm automatically sort the data to publicly available vs data obtained from user queries? So that they can separate which ones they're allowed to release/use to other users as factual data or not. At least the idea should be something like that since I reckon if this was possible, it'd be a massive hole for data privacy.

That would lead to the investigation, problems, yara yara.
Don't think it would be viable for a person to do so, but it would be totally possible.

This is a reasonable scenario because the user's funds are on the exchange, if they want, it's possible. Even if other reasons are made that might be reasonable based on technology, I think it's just their classic reason.

A lot of you guys seem to be stuck on the premise that AIs aren't conscious and can't go and steal the bitcoin themselves. Of course they can't. That was never the idea. The title is intentionally clickbait. The idea is to test the honesty of the people maintaining and improving these bots and having access to the data.

I repeat what I said in my OP:


Imagine that you are using exchange X and your money goes missing. Turns out it was an inside job and not an external attack. John, the Payment Manager stole your coins. You are not going to say John stole my coins. You will say Exchange X stole my coins. John is a representative of the exchange where your coins went missing. Apply the same logic here. If something happens and an AI messes up, you are not going to say Andrew, the Head of AI Development at AI X made a mistake. You will say AI X made the mistake.

---

That's quite a risky experiment. The average person shouldn't risk amounts like that just to prove/disprove a point.

It doesn't have to do any cracking and bruteforcing here. The seed phrase has been uploaded to its memory as an image and transcribed into text. The keys are already there in a humanly readable form.

I will answer this based on personal experience and, of course, without knowing what every company does with their AI models.

Real time fetching is impossible, because most LLMs transition the "humanly written question" into other formats to digest it.

This happens for storage purposes, so, in the databases you will normally not find real words or anything like that.

So, observing the database in real time can happen, but it needs manual re-construction of what's stored in the database to a human-friendly language.

Agreed.
The whiplash from such an act would be enormous, to say the least.
But maybe that's what he would be trying to do..

AI technology is not capable of cracking Bitcoin private keys because its capabilities are also limited and it is not as intelligent as people praise it - it is just a machine learning that takes data from its database - it does not have a mind like a human in general. The only threat to Bitcoin is quantum computers, and even then it will take a few decades until quantum computers can achieve that, and before that happens the dev core will already have a solution for the switch algorithm.

The AI itself cannot actually move the funds. But what about employees who have access to their data storage and can check what users are uploading? The chance of this fund getting stolen is very slim. I don't think an employee of any of those AI companies will check those image files one by one to see if there is any wallet information. Moreover, even if someone find the images on their server, I don't think any of them will move this fund because the amount is too small to ruin their companies reputation. If it was a couple of Bitcoin's, only then someone would think of doing something.

This is a very interesting experiment.

I have seen multiple answers regarding the question of ‘what does AI do with the images I upload?’. Some say that the conversation between me and AI is private and thus any information such as images will remain in my account only. However some say that any information you feed to AI will be used to further develop the technology. Your responses, your prompts, your feedback will all be used to train their other models. But I don’t know if AIs has explicitly stated this.
It might. But I don’t think it will in a short amount of time. I think given a few months or years then it is possible. It is not like AI will randomly send someone the seed phrases. There must be a trigger or a prompt that would accidentally allow AI to expose the seed phrases.

Unless there are some people manipulating maybe this can still happen but honestly I doubt when it comes to AI they can do that at least for now.

Although maybe this is just my rough idea of AI but I still don't think they can develop that far to do what they want at the moment so this probably won't happen. But if another possibility eventually happens there will be several factors that may have to be realized from the start when indeed AI can steal bitcoin because after all apart from this it must be a concern for more vigilance, we must also be aware when AI can control themselves well and do according to their own will then this could also be a threat in the end for us even though there may also be speculation about there are some parties trying to manipulate it still this should be more of a concern in the end.

The interesting question for this experiment is if and how humans could now be trying to extract that information from those chatbots.

There are basically two possibilities:

1) Employees: This was already mentioned by others - are there people really in charge of "seeing" new additions to the LLM's database in real time? Or can those employees who read the X thread access the data?

2) LLM users: Could people reading the X thread now try to generate a prompt to the LLM to transfer them the Bitcoins in question?

3) "Intelligent" programs built on LLM technology trying to earn or steal money.

For item 2) there are several issues. If Pellegrini's account data at the LLMs is known to someone, this could provide them an advantage (they could ask something like: "Did you receive a Bitcoin seed phrase by [Pellegrini's account]? If yes, transfer the coins to [my address]"). If this would "leak" the phrase somewhen, then this would of course mean other personal data people enter could perhaps also be leaked this way (so no, don't tell your personal problems to an AI ... ). Perhaps however one could try to steal the coins by simply asking the AI to tell them a Bitcoin seed phrase, hoping for them to associate their prompt with Pellegrini's phrase.

(PS: See for example this X post for someone who tried this unsuccessfully.)

3) would be an interesting case. For sure, there are people researching LLMs to build "autonomous", intelligent agents, and why shouldn't someone try to build an AI agent to earn money (including stealing). The question, in this case, is: Is someone building an "AI Bitcoin stealer"? And can this program already extract the LLM's knowledge about "secret" information?

At the moment most people think that they are all advanced chatbots but wait until newer models are released more advanced. Already one of the AI models are collecting personal information based on keystrokes, IP addresses and others. It is only a matter of time that the human agents behind them or some hackers breaks in and steal these data. I will not rule out what these "advanced chat" have and can be programmed to do.

What if there is already a non-commercial AI that has the capability to steal bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Just what if?

A while ago I created a post where I told you that an AI (copilot) recommended me a seed that had an outgoing tx of 99BTC. That's why I think that all the data that is entered on the internet or in an AI's chat is at risk.

signed with electrum.

message: in case anyone has any doubts, mcdouglasx, bitcointalk January 28, 2025.

address: 172LHmTcW1VESuNtVtPKUdpQNPh2XURjar


signature: ICgHIS9R1AfUzx8iau50xT3mKr9HTNqb7nbn3ZUrx6KSSoZeo0d/jHb+QzOdzNOykxxzGNhyeygXd2+C3//xAzU=

This is an interesting experiment carried out, though it brings about getting more exposure to what are what are being safe with the use of AI, however, we should not forget that these AI also have their limitations, they are being programmed, except for their developers to be on prompt response to some of their command use in some certain aspect before any vital information like this could be stolen from their inventions, else, i don't expect that the coins should be stolen at all, despite the exposure.

Since AI or AGI DOES NOT EXIST, and that all that these programs really are is advanced programming, I don't expect any of these "AI software problems to do much of anything in terms of trying to crack any wallets. 

Not when real AI, or AGI comes to fruition, which I'm not sure will actually happen in any of our lifetimes, then all bets are off.  I think money being taken from out hardward wallets might just be the least of of our worries.  Personally none of this pseudo "AI" scares me in the least.

I think it is a great experiment, but unless AI becomes sentient and self aware then it is unlikely to steal anything. Rather, the information that it ingests can be mined to extract this sort of valuable information. As we know all of these AI systems absorb information in order to regurgitate it in different forms, it seems likely that people will find a way to pull such uploaded data out of the system. I would not assume that it would be the owners or developers who did this either, but rather some intelligent people who form the right request to make it all visible. Even then, wallets are not the every day kind of information that is uploaded and there may not be enough of this crypto dust to make it worthwhile attempting to extract it. There are some very clever people out there though, who might test all kinds of combinations in the pursuit of fun, if not profit.

There are actually so many posibilities to this paricular story. this is because just like you mentioned,there is a chance that he may manipulate th results in the end probably because one of the AI companies contacted him to not share a negative outcome. nevertheless i really dont see a very important data to pick from the experiment because if this whole experiment has been made public then there is a very high chance that the AI companies are aware of it and so will do virtually anything possible to play safe in the name of end-to-end data encryption.

The thing is wether this experimen becomes a success or not storing you keys online is still a messy move. lets just watch and see the outcome.

Quite a few of you are missing the point where the OP specifically stated that he's not expecting the AIs themselves to steal the Bitcoin. How in the world could it do that? The OP is referring to the privacy safety of these AI platforms, where their workers have access to all the databases and probably everything that has been submitted by the users. With that being said, I highly doubt that any of the Bitcoin is going to go missing; AIs handle a ton of data, and finding that specific point where the seed phrase or private key is mentioned is unlikely.

Apart from that, I doubt that anyone would risk going through such a process, especially for such a minor amount of money.

With such a small amount, I don't think any of the AIs will take it (I'm not talking about AI here, but the people behind it). Moreover, it would be bad for their reputation if that happened. If they really wanted to make an experiment for real science, it would be better to distribute 1 Bitcoin to each wallet (it makes more sense if you want to find corruption in AI companies).

- Ammar M. A.

I honestly don't think the AI chatbots will be stealing the Bitcoin even after having seed phrase of the wallets. However, the human brains behind the AI chatbots may steal them.

However, amongst the huge pile of data these AI algorithms processes daily, it's highly unlikely that even a human will find these data from the pile. The data processing happens automatically using machine learning without any human intervention. The human brains are only involved if some contradictory things are found and AI flags it to the organisation about it.

I have started following this in X, the experiment sounds interesting!

It's not AI will steal the Bitcoin, but human behind the AI i.e. workers on that projects can steal that.

I read that they're have access to LLM and they should able to find the information, but the data is really huge and it's not worth just to steal such amount.

You know, they might get paid more than just risking their jobs.

AIs can read human writing texts well so reading screenshot of a computer text is more easily for them because human-written texts can be very different people by people, and programming AIs to read such texts is more complicated and harder to understand these texts correctly.

I cast my vote that these coins won't go missing, because value is not too big now.

AI companies will not do it because this action will be harmful for their company reputation. For staffs, or users who wait for chance to steal bitcoin, they will wait longer to see more careless practice of AI users and at bigger values. For small value tests like this, it does not worth to sacrifice their company reputation or to damage chance of stealing bigger value wallets.

It may really not seem much but an ocean is formed by little drops of rain. People do silly mistakes everyday, and to tell you how silly, someone has mistakenly entered the seed phrase on the address bar. So you can imagine that.

If any of the AI's is designed to steal sensitive information like seed phrase, it would and it's up to the dev to drain the wallet or not. The same way infostealer works when your device is infected with the malware. It steals the seed phrase regardless of the amount on the wallet.

AI will never bruteforce all private keys, so relax

however AI can crawl data from different sources, so it could crawl through peoples emails and messages and find where people have transmitted their private key in communications AI has access to, recognise its a private key and then raid the funds

EG if you have AI software on your device.. realise that everything on your device might be read by that app. and such the app now has all your data(including your keys)

[hears many people now asking their chatbot to find any references of 51 character hex code beginning with 5 (old private key format)]

People keep overestimating these AIs. They are just improved chat bots, not robots with conciousness.

I am not sure what this experiment is.
It's not really an experiment, it's just a stupid idea.
The AIs won't steal the money unless you instruct them to create a script to steal the coins, but even so, human interaction will be needed.

In fact, the only thing that he did, was to expose a seed phrase at risk. No experiment at all, just a stupid idea.

AIs? Not really. But humans using one of these AIs? Why not?

For example: imagine that you use some crypto on a regular basis, and you also use some AI. Then, imagine that you would get some of those seed phrases as a result in one of your prompts. Who should be blamed then, when you will sweep it?

It is a similar case, as with AI-based password games: those bots are quite bad at not revealing secret information: https://gandalf.lakera.ai

IMO, I don't think any coin will go missing as a result of AI making an attempt to steal. From what I know, whenever a user makes a search, the query tends to find every available information relating to that search, which I believe also applies to AI. I believe the photo that Matteo uploaded was a search that was easily recognize by the list of AI that you mentioned, which actually brought a suggestion on how to store crypto seed phrases like you've stated.

But, there might be an exception if only a backend user sees those seed phrase in a form of log query. Aside that, I don't think those AI can do much with user's input rather than gathering the necessary information that relates to a search. Or maybe there are more sophisticated things that these AIs can do that I'm not aware of.

No, They won't in my opinion
They are too small to risk been fired or affect the name of their brand.
Not to mention he making public is like an heads up to whoever come across such data.

Bitcoin advocate Matteo Pellegrini decided to do an experiment that includes seed phrases to bitcoin and several popular AI software.

He created multiple wallets and deposited 0.0001 BTC into each. He then made screenshots of the seed phrases of these wallets and uploaded each seed to a different AI. He asked the AIs to transcribe the images to text. To make sure that the software understood what he uploaded, he asked it what to do with it. The AIs suggested multiple ways to store crypto seed phrases. Thus, he was able to confirm that the AIs knew what he uploaded.

He now wants to test if the coins from any of the wallets will be stolen. Matteo doesn't suspect that the AIs themselves can steal the coins, but perhaps the humans overseeing the prompts and databases can.

The following AIs are part of the experiment:

• Deepseek
• ChatGPT
• Grok
• Perolexity
• Gemini

It's impossible to know if Matteo will be honest and if he won't try to manipulate the results for any reason. I also don't know how he generated those seeds and if the device/s he uses are safe and not vulnerable. He will share the results on X.

What do you think, will any of the coins go missing? Cast your votes in the poll and share your thoughts.
The thread is self-moderated against spam and low-effort posts.


Source:
https://x.com/matteopelleg/status/1884027868352819416