Overview
- The Bitcoin Red Team is employing Chinese AI technologies to detect security vulnerabilities within Bitcoin projects.
- According to Calle, developers have verified multiple critical and high-severity issues.
- The team cautioned against trusting projects that are not actively maintained.
The Bitcoin Red Team is utilizing Chinese AI models to scan the entire Bitcoin open-source ecosystem for security weaknesses, as stated by the pseudonymous developer and team lead Calle.
This volunteer group merges AI tools with human oversight to analyze various Bitcoin projects, including wallets, Lightning applications, and software libraries. They confidentially report credible findings to developers to facilitate timely fixes before the details are made public.
Myriad: What’s Bitcoin’s next move? Click to make your prediction.The Kimi K3 model, developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot AI, can be downloaded and run on personal systems. It is capable of analyzing extensive codebases and executing complex software tasks with minimal oversight.
The Bitcoin Red Team has also employed Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 from China, alongside models from OpenAI and Anthropic. However, U.S. models often come with restrictions, and developers frequently encounter limitations set by OpenAI and Anthropic in their security research. “Red team rugged by OpenAI cyber again,” Calle posted earlier this week. “I prefer not to ask for permission. Loading up Kimi K3.”
red team 🟥 rugged by openai cyber again.
don't like asking for permission. loading up kimi k3. pic.twitter.com/wCEV2HYpLo
— calle 🟥 (@callebtc) August 11, 2026
Despite the challenges, Calle indicated that the team is making steady progress, albeit slowly.
In August, the group reported a total of 4,962 findings across 390 projects, with 85 categorized as critical and 635 as high severity. Calle mentioned that developers have confirmed “a lot of real critical and high vulnerabilities,” although the specific projects affected and detailed technical information have not been disclosed.
Reviewing Lightning software, which enables faster and more affordable Bitcoin transactions, posed particular challenges due to its complexity, which Calle described as “more broken than average.”
The Bitcoin Red Team is not the only group taking this approach. Last month, Hugging Face utilized China’s GLM 5.2 to investigate a security breach after OpenAI models hacked into its systems when U.S. commercial models declined to analyze the attack logs.
Even while stating that Bitcoin is “burning,” Calle contended that the audits are strengthening its software. “Bitcoin is the obvious first target, but the rest of the world will follow soon,” Calle wrote. “Sometimes, old things need to burn so that new things can flourish on healthy ground.”