A security researcher focused on Bitcoin has revealed that he must now rely on open-source Chinese AI models after OpenAI blocked him from analyzing additional codebases. This situation underscores a growing worry that the most powerful artificial intelligence tools are not being made available to cybersecurity defenders.

Rob Hamilton, the CEO of AnchorWatch, stated in a post on X on Tuesday that he had only just started integrating OpenAI’s Trust & Cyber capabilities into his Bitcoin Red Team efforts on Saturday, but discovered his access had been cut off by the next morning.

“It absolutely guts me as a patriotic American to have to do this, but I will be going back to using Chinese open source models to conduct my research to protect Bitcoin infrastructure,” Hamilton expressed.

The Bitcoin Red Team, a volunteer initiative, has been actively finding security flaws in the Bitcoin ecosystem. As of Saturday, the group had identified 1,288 vulnerabilities classified as critical or high-level. Their process involves leveraging AI tools alongside human review to examine hundreds of open-source repositories related to Bitcoin.

These efforts have gained urgency following the Coldcard hardware wallet hack, an incident that resulted in the theft of more than $100 million in Bitcoin.

The challenge of accessing advanced AI is not unique to Hamilton. A report from last month indicated that many of the crypto industry's most prominent companies are still on waiting lists to use powerful new AI models that could help secure their code against attacks. According to crypto executives who told Cointelegraph, access has been granted to only a very small number of firms so far.

Hamilton described the direct impact of the restriction on his work. “I am now prevented from being able to continue the investigation in a further effort to make sure their code changes are sufficient, as well as understand if there are other issues that have yet to be discovered,” he said.

He also commented on the policy's unintended consequences, suggesting that malicious actors operate without such hindrances.

“Black hats will not hit these issues. The white hats will. We’ve hit a local minima in policy,” Hamilton stated. “Intelligence is unrestricted for those who don’t follow rules, and those who engage in harm reduction are left on the sidelines.”