Vitalik Buterin is revisiting how Ethereum and artificial intelligence should evolve together, arguing that much of the industry is approaching AI from the wrong angle.
Key Takeaways
Vitalik Buterin warns that racing blindly toward AGI risks centralization and loss of human control.
He sees Ethereum as the foundation for safer AI, focused on privacy, verification, and decentralization.
AI could unlock better markets and governance by scaling human decision-making rather than replacing it.
Instead of treating “AGI” as a single finish line that everyone must race toward, he believes the real challenge is choosing the right direction early. In his view, unchecked acceleration risks concentrating power, weakening individual freedom, and increasing systemic dangers long before true AGI even arrives.
Building on ideas he first outlined two years ago, Buterin presents a clearer, more grounded framework for how Ethereum and AI can intersect in the near term. Rather than abstract theory, his focus is on practical tools and systems that can be built today – tools that shape how AI is used, owned, and controlled before it becomes too powerful to steer.
Trust, privacy, and human control
One of Buterin’s main priorities is making interactions with AI more private and trustless by design. He highlights the importance of local language models that run on personal devices, reducing dependence on centralized AI providers. Alongside this, he points to zero-knowledge payments for AI services, allowing users to pay for API calls without creating persistent identity trails.
The broader goal is to bring Ethereum’s privacy philosophy into the AI world. Just as crypto aimed to remove blind trust from finance, Buterin argues that AI systems should not require users to surrender data, identity, or control simply to function. Cryptographic verification, client-side checks, and privacy-preserving compute are meant to ensure that humans remain in charge, even as models become more capable.
Ethereum as the coordination layer for AI
Buterin also sees Ethereum evolving into an economic and coordination layer for AI agents themselves. In this model, autonomous agents can transact with each other, post security deposits, build onchain reputations, and be held accountable for their behavior. This enables AI systems that are not all owned or operated by a single company behind closed doors.
Importantly, he stresses that this is not about financializing AI for speculation’s sake. Instead, economic tools are used to enable decentralized cooperation. By giving AI agents verifiable identities and incentives, Ethereum can support open, competitive AI ecosystems rather than tightly controlled, centralized ones.
Smarter markets and governance
Beyond infrastructure, Buterin argues that AI can finally make better markets and governance systems workable. Concepts like prediction markets, advanced voting mechanisms, and decentralized decision-making have long looked good on paper but failed in practice due to limits on human attention and reasoning.
Large language models, he says, remove that bottleneck by scaling human judgment. With AI assistance, individuals can participate in more complex decisions without being overwhelmed. This opens the door to governance systems that are more informed, more inclusive, and harder to capture by narrow interests.
Overall, Buterin’s message is a clear pushback against blind acceleration. Rather than asking how fast AI can advance, he is asking how it should advance – and who remains in control along the way. In this framing, Ethereum is not competing to build AGI, but providing the foundations for an AI-driven future that is safer, more decentralized, and more aligned with human autonomy.
