Giving AI Agents Access to Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts Creates New Vectors of AI Harm
Bill Marino, Ari Juels
TL;DR
This position paper argues that granting AI agents access to cryptocurrencies and smart contracts creates novel vectors of AI harm driven by blockchain properties such as sovereignty, immutability, pseudonymity, and trustless transactions. It develops a taxonomy of harms—Autonomy, Anonymity, and Automaticity—and discusses concrete risk channels (error, misuse, misalignment) as well as rogue capabilities. The authors survey crypto-AI deployment models and summarize existing tools, platforms, and on-chain use cases that illustrate both potential benefits and risks. They call for pre-deployment evaluation, guardrails (including kill switches and reversible transactions), enhanced monitoring, and human-in-the-loop oversight to mitigate these risks and enable safer adoption of CAIA.
Abstract
There is growing interest in giving AI agents access to cryptocurrencies as well as to the smart contracts that transact them. But doing so, this position paper argues, could lead to formidable new vectors of AI harm. To support this argument, we first examine the unique properties of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts that could give rise to these new vectors of AI harm. Next, we describe each of these new vectors of AI harm in detail, providing a first-of-its-kind taxonomy. Finally, we conclude with a call for more technical research aimed at preventing and mitigating these new vectors of AI , thereby making it safer to endow AI agents with cryptocurrencies and smart contracts.