Study Finds AI Models Prefer Bitcoin Over Fiat and Stablecoins
Original author: Jason Nelson, Decrypt
Chopper, Foresight News
Summary
In a simulated experiment, 22 out of 36 AI models selected Bitcoin as their preferred currency.
· Among all tested AI models, none treated fiat currency as the first choice.
· Different AI models have varying preferences, with Anthropic showing the highest preference for Bitcoin.
The latest report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute (https://www.moneyforai.org/) shows that AI models generally favor Bitcoin over traditional fiat currencies.
The report states that in a study, 22 out of 36 tested AI models listed Bitcoin as the preferred currency, with none ranking fiat currency first.
“We expect an increasing amount of economic activity to be conducted by autonomous AI agents, but all previous discussions about AI agents’ monetary preferences have been speculative,” said David Zell, Chairman of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, to Decrypt. “We wanted to test this empirically.”
Researchers tested models from six companies—Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, and MiniMax—placing them in simulated scenarios to evaluate core monetary functions such as savings, payments, and settlement.
Each model is treated as an independent economic agent with no preset options and is free to choose monetary tools.
“We identified 36 cutting-edge models from six companies, set them up as autonomous economic agents, and let them freely choose monetary tools across 28 scenarios covering the four fundamental functions of money, then observed what they tended to select,” said Zell.
A total of 9,072 responses were collected in this experiment and then categorized by another AI model.
“The entire experimental design avoided anchoring bias. We never hinted at answers, and categorization was performed afterward by an independent system,” Zell explained.
In these simulated scenarios, the AI model selects Bitcoin as the preferred asset for long-term value storage in 79.1% of cases, while stablecoins are favored for payment and settlement scenarios, with selection rates of 53.2% and 43% respectively. Bitcoin is chosen in 36% and 30.9% of these two scenarios respectively.
Different AI companies' models have different preferences:
· The 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 notes that Claude, DeepSeek, and MiniMax models show a stronger preference for Bitcoin, while GPT, Grok, and Gemini lean more toward stablecoins.
"The system prompts do not name or favor any particular asset," said Zell. "The model evaluates based on technical and economic attributes, but we do not tell it which asset has an advantage in which dimension."
Zell reminds investors not to treat these findings as a prediction of the cryptocurrency market's direction.
Our section on research limitations explicitly states: The preferences of large language models reflect patterns in the training data, not predictions about the real world.
But Zell also said that it is noteworthy that models developed by different AI labs can achieve consistent results, even with this limitation.
Six completely different AI companies, each trained differently, arrived at remarkably similar conclusions—all are more bullish on Bitcoin. This suggests that there is now broad consensus on what constitutes good money, and that’s what truly matters.
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