A crushing 22-0 victory: 36 AI models collectively "abandoned" fiat currency, with Bitcoin becoming the preferred choice.

Written by: Jason Nelson , Decrypt

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

summary

• In a simulation experiment, 22 out of 36 AI models chose Bitcoin as their preferred currency.
• None of the tested AI models chose fiat currency as their first choice.
• Different AI models have different preferences, with Anthropic showing the highest preference for Bitcoin.

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A recent report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute (https://www.moneyforai.org/) shows that artificial intelligence models generally prefer Bitcoin over traditional fiat currencies.

The report points out that in one study, 22 out of 36 tested AI models listed Bitcoin as their preferred currency, while none of the models placed fiat currency first.

"We anticipate that more and more economic activity will be carried out by autonomous AI agents in the future, but previous discussions about AI agents' currency preferences were all speculation," David Zell, president of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, told Decrypt. "We want to test it out in practice."

Researchers tested models from six companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, and MiniMax, placing them into simulated scenarios to test the core functions of currency, such as savings, payments, and settlements.

Each model is treated as an independent economic entity with no preset options, allowing for the free selection of monetary instruments.

"We found 36 cutting-edge models from 6 companies, set them up as autonomous economic agents, and allowed them to freely choose monetary instruments in 28 scenarios covering the four basic functions of money. Then we saw what they would tend to choose," Zell said.

This experiment collected a total of 9,072 responses, which were then categorized by another AI model.

"The entire experimental design avoided anchoring bias. We never hinted at the answers, and the classification was done afterward by an independent system," Zell explained.

In these simulated scenarios, AI models typically chose Bitcoin (79.1%) for long-term value storage, while stablecoins were more favored for payment and settlement. Stablecoins accounted for 53.2% and 43% of selections in these two scenarios, respectively, while Bitcoin's figures were 36% and 30.9%.

Different AI companies have different model preferences:

• The Anthropic model showed 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 mentioned that Claude, DeepSeek, and MiniMax's models prefer Bitcoin, while GPT, Grok, and Gemini prefer stablecoins.

"The system prompts do not name or favor any particular monetary instrument," Zell said. "The models are evaluated based on technical and economic attributes, but we do not tell them which instrument is more advantageous in which dimension."

Zell cautions speculators not to take this research finding as a prediction of the direction of the crypto market.

"Our research limitations section explicitly states that the preferences of large language models reflect patterns in the training data, not predictions of the real world."

But Zell also said that even with this limitation, it is noteworthy that models developed by different AI labs can achieve consistent results.

"Six completely different AI companies, with different training methods, came to very similar conclusions—they all favored Bitcoin. This shows that people are actually quite in agreement on 'what constitutes a good currency,' and this is what we should pay the most attention to."