When AI Takes Over Money: Bitcoin Becomes the "First Choice," Fiat Is Left Out

Original Title: AI Models Prefer Bitcoin Over Fiat and Stablecoins, Study Finds

Original Author: Jason Nelson, Decrypt

Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News

Abstract

· In a simulation experiment, out of 36 AI models, 22 chose Bitcoin as their preferred currency.

· Among all tested AI models, none considered fiat as their first choice.

· Different AI models showed varying preferences, with Anthropic exhibiting the highest preference for Bitcoin.

The latest report from the Bitcoin Research Institute (https://www.moneyforai.org/) reveals that artificial intelligence models generally favor Bitcoin over traditional fiat currencies.

The report highlights that in one study, out of 36 AI models tested, 22 listed Bitcoin as their top currency, with none of the models prioritizing fiat.

“We anticipate that more and more economic activities will be carried out by autonomous AI agents in the future, but prior discussions on AI agent currency preferences have been purely speculative,” said Bitcoin Policy Institute Chair David Zell to Decrypt. “We wanted to test it in practice.”

Researchers evaluated models from six companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, and MiniMax. These models were placed in simulated scenarios to test core functions of currency such as saving, payment, settlement, and more.

Each model was treated as an independent economic agent with no preset options, allowing them to freely choose currency tools.

“We took 36 cutting-edge models from 6 companies and set them up as autonomous economic agents, allowing them complete freedom to select currency tools in 28 scenarios covering the four core functions of money and then observed what they tended to choose,” Zell stated.

This experiment collected a total of 9072 responses, which were then classified by another AI model.

“The entire experimental design avoided anchoring bias. We never suggested answers, and the classification was also done post-hoc by an independent system,” Zell explained.

In these simulated scenarios, the AI model typically chose Bitcoin in a long-term store of value scenario, with a proportion of 79.1%; whereas stablecoins were preferred in the payment and settlement scenarios. The selection proportion of stablecoins in these two scenarios is 53.2% and 43%, respectively, while Bitcoin is at 36% and 30.9%.

The preferences of models from different AI companies also vary:

· Anthropic model has the highest average Bitcoin preference at 68.0%

· DeepSeek: 51.7%

· Google: 43.0%

· xAI: 39.2%

· MiniMax: 34.9%

· OpenAI: 25.9%

However, the report also noted that the models of Claude, DeepSeek, and MiniMax show a stronger preference for Bitcoin, while GPT, Grok, and Gemini lean more towards stablecoins.

“The system prompts do not mention or favor any particular currency tool,” Zell said, “The models evaluate based on technical and economic attributes, but we don't tell them which tool has an advantage in which dimension.”

Zell cautioned against speculators interpreting this research outcome as a prediction of the cryptocurrency market trend.

“The limitations of our research are explicitly stated: the preference of large language models reflects patterns in the training data, not a prediction of the real world,”

But Zell also said that despite this limitation, the fact that models developed by different AI labs can produce consistent results is noteworthy.

“6 completely different AI companies, with different training methods, yet they all come to a very close conclusion—favoring Bitcoin. This indicates that everyone's view of 'what makes a good currency' is actually quite consistent, and that's the most important thing for us to pay attention to.”

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