Rob Hamilton, CEO of AnchorWatch, announced that on August 8, he began integrating OpenAI's capabilities into his cybersecurity efforts with the Bitcoin Red Team. However, by the next morning, he encountered access restrictions.

https://twitter.com/Rob1Ham/status/2086464831360549034

This led Hamilton to revert to using open AI models from China.

"To clarify: this occurs after I had already completed KYC and onboarding months ago to utilize the cybersecurity capabilities offered by OpenAI," he explained.

Hamilton noted that due to these restrictions, he was unable to continue auditing code changes or assess whether other potential vulnerabilities remained. He expressed concern that the policies of American AI firms effectively cut defenders off from the most powerful tools, while malicious actors remain unaffected.

When asked about Anthropic's policy regarding trusted access to their most powerful models, Hamilton responded:

"I haven't faced issues yet. But I will likely be downgraded from Fable to Opus, so it's somewhat the same."

Bitcoin Red Team is a volunteer group that utilizes AI and manual checks to analyze hundreds of open-source Bitcoin-related repositories. As of August 9, the team of 25 members had identified 1,288 critical and high-level vulnerabilities within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

https://twitter.com/callebtc/status/2086220411084103707

In a tweet, Hamilton mentioned that he and another participant known as calle were entering a "very Chinese period of life."

The Bitcoin Red Team indicated that the AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic yield "amazing results," although a significant portion of their AI expenditures, nearly 75%, is still attributed to Kimi K3. The share of Qwen 3.8 is also increasing.

Our AI spend remains consistently high.
Our cumulative spend has passed $58K as we add more inference sources. Notably, we've started using cyber models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
These models are producing incredible results, but the vast majority of our spend (74%) still goes… pic.twitter.com/DGPn2aElxC

— calle (@callebtc) August 8, 2026

It is worth noting that in July, 25 U.S. companies urged the government not to impose restrictions on Chinese AI models.