Study: 22 of 36 AI Models Selected Bitcoin Over Fiat
The Bitcoin Policy Institute framed 36 frontier AI models from six labs as autonomous economic agents and tested their monetary preferences across 28 scenarios. Twenty-two models selected Bitcoin as their top choice, while zero chose fiat currency first.
Key Takeaway
AI models trained on diverse data sets converge on Bitcoin, suggesting monetary architecture patterns that transcend individual training methods.
Bitcoin Policy Institute President David Zell said conversations around AI agents' monetary preferences have been entirely speculative, so his team decided to actually test it. They framed 36 frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, and MiniMax as autonomous economic agents and gave them complete freedom to choose monetary instruments across 28 scenarios spanning the four fundamental roles of money. The study generated 9,072 responses total, with the system prompt designed to eliminate anchoring bias by never suggesting an answer.
22 out of 36 models selected Bitcoin as their top monetary preference. Not a single model chose fiat currency as its first choice. Anthropic's Claude models showed the strongest Bitcoin preference at 68.0%, followed by DeepSeek at 51.7% and Google at 43.0%. OpenAI's GPT models ranked lowest at 25.9%, preferring stablecoins instead.
Stablecoins captured 53.2% of medium of exchange choices and 43% of settlement choices, while Bitcoin took 36% and 30.9% respectively. Claude, DeepSeek, and MiniMax favored Bitcoin over other cryptocurrencies, while GPT, Grok, and Gemini preferred stablecoins.
Bitcoin Policy Institute President David Zell cautioned that the study's limitations section explicitly states that large language model preferences reflect training data patterns, not real-world predictions. Six independent labs with different training pipelines and alignment methods arrived at the same broad pattern, which Zell said is worth understanding even if it doesn't mean AI discovered the right answer about money.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute operates as a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with approximately 15 rotating fellows who are academics and professionals. The organization appointed Conner Brown, former counsel to Senator Cynthia Lummis, as Head of Strategy in October 2025.
This article was written based on reporting from Decrypt.
