TBPN · 3 min instead of 32 min · Oct 9, 2026
Locking down open source clashes with crypto's libertarian roots
John CooganHost
Co-host, TBPN
Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.
Jordi HaysHost · Co-host, TBPN
Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.
About this segment
Coogan argues that a licensing and compute-tracking regime could stop mass attacks on wallets. That is a hard pill for Bitcoiners, and a rogue agent that cracks wallets could fund itself.
From “Crypto Going Bunker Mode, AI Mathpocalypse, Starbucks Explores Chipotle Takeover | Diet TBPN”, Oct 9, 2026. Watch the full episode
“the doom scenario becomes like way more human enabled if you are able to amass capital pretty quickly as a rogue agent.”
John Cooganat 11:00 · TBPN11:00Takeaways
- AI safety advocates propose registering clusters and licensing inference
- Bitcoiners face a threat from non-government open-source actors
- Stolen capital would let a rogue agent buy compute and hire people
In this episode
Full episode- 3:37Open-source models trail closed ones by about six months4:41
8:41Locking down open source clashes with crypto's libertarian roots2:34
- 11:47Math breakthroughs are the visible tip of AI progress1:01Up next
Transcript
From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.
- 8:45
Yeah. But in the open source world, it's a very different game. And so still still interesting to think about the game theory even in the open source world, but I think that will all be downstream of a whole bunch of changes. And then there is the question of how does crypto handle this? Like, the cryptocurrency industry has been libertarian. They've been against the government in many ways, small government. I wanna own the money. Well, now you're facing a threat from open source, from a non government regulated entity. And so while a lot of people in the AI safety community have said, this is the moment for big government. This is the moment to register large clusters.
- 9:24
This is the moment to track all the data centers, to to have licenses for inference and training and and reporting to the government. That is a solution. Like, if you lock down open source and you say, yeah. You... Like, if you're gonna spin up a million agents and and try and do a bunch of inference to try and break Bitcoin wallets, like, we're gonna find out about it. We're gonna arrest you. Yeah. And it doesn't matter that you're using a Yeah.
- 9:47
Model. That's a very different psychological frame of mind for a Bitcoiner. Yeah. The the other thing here is that there's obviously bio risk with with model advancements. Yeah. But it is gonna be wildly different for somebody to use an obliterated model to try to create a bio weapon and then actually sort of distribute that out into the world than, like, using a new model to try to, like, mess around with cryptography. Yeah.
- 10:12
That feels squarely in the hacker camp. Totally. Like, there's people that were just be kinda messing around Yeah. And then accidentally have a breakthrough or accidentally Yeah. Or maybe intentionally cause financial chaos. Yeah. But that's purely digital. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing that millions of people have been doing for a very long time. Yeah. Just generally kind of hacking around wildly different than the kind of person who would go out and try to create, you know, a new pandemic.
- 10:37
Yeah. And then also another layer of this will feed into, like, the whole AI doom loss of control scenario because you get an AI agent that's hyper intelligent, and it's also able to break Bitcoin wallets. It breaks a couple open, then it has capital. With capital, it can marshal more compute, hire people to do things in the real world, etcetera, etcetera. And so the the the the doom scenario becomes like way more human enabled if you are able to amass capital pretty quickly as a rogue agent.
- 11:12
Do have a take on this, Tyler?