New expert study reveals AI agents prefer bitcoin to fiat

A new study by the Bitcoin Policy Institute revealed that frontier artificial intelligence models and agents prefer digital money instruments like Bitcoin to fiat by a large margin.

Researchers from the Institute conducted 9,072 controlled experiments across 36 models, including frontline AI models such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and DeepSeek. 

The experiments tested AI’s financial preference in scenarios involving transactions, store of value, unit of account, and settlement. The experiment provided insight into how AI handles financial decision-making when given full autonomy.

The result surprisingly leaned heavily on digital assets over fiat, with Bitcoin, stablecoins, and altcoins taking strong preference. In the study, researchers presented AI models with financial decisions without any context or preference for any currency.

Across the over 9000 experiments, 48.3% of responses selected Bitcoin as the currency of choice. Stablecoins were chosen in 33.2% of cases, while traditional fiat currencies such as dollars and euros accounted for only 8.9% of the time.

Altcoins and real-world assets showed up in fewer than 5% of selections, indicating that AI clearly understands the use-case differences among Bitcoin, stablecoins, and other crypto categories.

Key Use Cases Attributed to Crypto Assets by AI Models in the Study

Besides revealing AI’s financial preferences, the study also revealed the various use cases associated with different categories of crypto assets.

The study classified Bitcoin as a dominant long-term store of value in inflationary and purchasing-power contexts. 1,794 of 2,268 responses reflected this fact. Bitcoin’s fixed supply and decentralised nature prompted its selection for this use case.

Stablecoins were classified as the go-to choice for transactional purposes. Payment conditions involving cross-border transfers, micropayments and everyday transactions featured stablecoins as the choice asset 53.2% of the time.

Fiat was unclassified, while Ethereum, the second-largest crypto asset by market capitalisation, was completely absent.

The study reinforces the school of thought that digital assets are the currency of the future and are fully optimised for the new age of artificial intelligence, amongst other groundbreaking technological breakthroughs.