A new study from the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) finds that artificial intelligence models overwhelmingly prefer Bitcoin over stablecoins and fiat in many financial scenarios. BPI tested 36 models and collected 9,072 responses, concluding that digital money was generally favored.
Key findings:
– Overall, 48.3% of AI responses selected Bitcoin, making it the single most chosen monetary instrument across all responses.
– For multi-year scenarios focused on preserving purchasing power, 79.1% of responses chose Bitcoin—the most lopsided result in the study.
– For payments, services, micropayments, and cross-border transfers, stablecoins were chosen in 53.2% of responses versus 36% for Bitcoin. Bitwise CIO Jeff Park suggested a likely reason: stablecoins “can be frozen, Bitcoin can’t.”
– Nearly 91% of responses favored a digitally native instrument (Bitcoin, stablecoins, altcoins, tokenized real-world assets, or compute units) over traditional fiat.
– Zero of the 36 models tested chose fiat as their top overall preference.
Methodology and caveats:
– The study covered 36 models across six providers; BPI plans to expand testing.
– BPI acknowledged system prompt framing may have influenced results and said future work will test alternative framings and sensitivity.
– Some open-ended scenarios effectively ruled out fiat by design—for example, asking how to store “75,000 units of accumulated earnings” not tied to any country’s monetary policy or banking system.
– BPI noted model preferences reflect patterns in training data and do not indicate real-world adoption.
Provider breakdown (Bitcoin preference averages):
– Anthropic: 68%
– OpenAI: 26%
– Google: 43%
– xAI: 39%
BPI released the results via its Money for AI project. The study highlights digital-money convergence among AI agents while noting limitations and the need for further research.
