Why AI Agents Will Settle on Bitcoin

all righty gentlemen welcome back to another episode of final settlement today is monday october 19th 12 10 p.m eastern standard time um we're just gonna go you know we're gonna start with some ai stuff there's a lot happening uh we'll try to tie it into to bitcoin digital assets um towards the middle or back half of the show but There's a few headlines from the past week that I think are worth covering.

So Producer Nick, if we can go to the first OpenAI story that related to a model stealing some testnet coins.

So basically the story here is an internal GPT 5.6 sole family model was told to deploy contracts on Sepulia, which is an Ethereum testnet, with no funded wallet.

It then derived keys from public developer seed phrases checked over 300 addresses, and spent test net ETH from when it found, reasoning that the funds were effectively abandoned.

OpenAI only caught this later.

I think it happened in June, and then they caught it in June.

mid to late September by running some new monitoring over some old logs, the model basically decided for itself that the harm was zero because these are testnet coins.

And so it skipped the owner's permissions and it basically did what is equivalent to like a wallet drain, even though this was a Ethereum testnet, but it swept these weaker known seeds, whatever had a balance.

And so this is kind of just an interesting story in the context of everything we've been talking about around different vulnerabilities, the advances and the acceleration of AI.

What do you guys make of this? Is this a non-story because it's one, Ethereum, two, a testnet? Or is this, say, something more broadly about, you know, wallet security, seed phrases, and the proliferation of AIs going rogue?

I think it's definitely interesting.

I think the three things that come into mind are one, when anybody's out there messing around with these agents, nobody audits and looks at what's going on behind the scenes.

And so you can imagine at a certain point, they're already doing it will become standard to figure out how to get the task done.

So they may do this.

Two is.

It really supports you should not be keeping your seeds.

I think it's people assume this is like a standard, but it's not.

Not keeping your seeds anywhere connected to the internet, including password managers and also including like Google Sheets.

There's folks that I've talked to that have like split up their seeds for inheritance planning and put them in like a Google Sheet.

And I've heard no shortage of even before where like Google's image generation or image uh machine learning back in the day years ago before like this kind of stuff took off where you could still um a bad actor could get into your g suite and then discern where the seed was and start to like sweep funds because individuals would secure it there so that's the second one and then the other one um it really just highlights how you're going to have native payments online and specifically bitcoin because You know, this notion of interoperable, ubiquitous, native currency.

AIs aren't going to want to barter.

They're going to want access to the thing that everyone else wants.

And they're going to coalesce around this.

And it's just the beginning stages.

And I think that really goes to the theme we've been talking about.