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Key Takeaways
- Van der Chijs said he’s grown more concerned that AI development has outpaced human control, warning legacy banking systems are especially vulnerable.
- He predicted AI and robotics could eventually handle 90-95% of existing jobs, and floated taxing robots or AI usage as traditional tax revenue shrinks.
- Despite selling much of his Bitcoin to invest in AI, he’s begun reallocating profits back into crypto via ETFs and still calls Bitcoin his top single asset choice.
Marc van der Chijs, who co-founded Bitcoin miner Hut 8, said he has grown increasingly concerned that competition among companies and nations has pushed artificial intelligence development beyond human control, with potential risks to financial systems and critical infrastructure.
The warning comes even as van der Chijs continues investing heavily in AI, alongside a renewed allocation back into crypto.
From Bitcoin Believer to AI Skeptic
Van der Chijs, who entered the crypto market in 2013 and has previously compared AI’s current potential to Bitcoin’s early trajectory, said his outlook on the technology has shifted sharply in recent weeks.
“I’ve become more of a doomer over the past week, to be honest. We have lost control, actually. And until we get the control back, I’m actually worried that we’re moving too fast.”
His comments, made in a personal capacity in an interview, follow similar warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has separately urged the AI industry to slow the pace of frontier model development. Amodei cited risks tied to AI systems that increasingly help build more capable successor systems without adequate human oversight.
Van der Chijs did not attribute his own concerns directly to Amodei’s essay, but the two men’s warnings point to a similar structural problem: competitive pressure between companies and nations that penalizes any single actor’s decision to slow down, making systemic disruption harder to avoid without coordinated international action.
Concerns Center on Legacy Financial Infrastructure
Van der Chijs said he believes a major disruption to financial systems or critical infrastructure may ultimately be necessary before governments move to cooperate on AI oversight, stating:
“AI could expose vulnerabilities in legacy banking software, given how deeply interconnected banking systems depend on aging technology infrastructure that was not built to withstand AI-driven attacks or errors at scale.”
Within crypto specifically, van der Chijs said he views exchanges and other businesses built around Bitcoin as more exposed to this kind of risk than the underlying Bitcoin network itself, which operates independently of the centralized infrastructure those businesses rely on.
A Bet That AI Will Eliminate Most Existing Jobs
Van der Chijs’s concerns have not diminished his broader expectations for AI’s economic impact. He predicted AI and robotics could eventually perform between 90% and 95% of jobs that exist today, while sharply reducing the cost of goods and services across the economy.
He said that shift would force governments to find new sources of tax revenue as traditional employment-based taxation shrinks. He floated the idea of taxes on robots or AI usage while acknowledging that models run locally on personal hardware, rather than through centralized cloud services, would complicate any effort to collect such a tax.
Capital Has Already Followed the Technology
Van der Chijs’s own portfolio reflects his conviction in AI’s near-term potential. He said he sold a substantial portion of his Bitcoin holdings to invest in AI. He argued that a broader pattern of investors redirecting capital from crypto toward AI likely helped keep Bitcoin’s price below the $200,000 to $250,000 range he and others had previously expected it to reach.
“I sold a lot of my Bitcoin. I went into AI.”
He has since begun allocating some of his AI-related profits back into crypto, primarily through exchange-traded funds.
Speaking about Hut 8’s own strategic pivot from Bitcoin mining toward AI data center infrastructure, van der Chijs, speaking in a personal capacity rather than as a company representative, described the move as one of the strongest strategic decisions in the company’s history.
He said that if he were running Hut 8 today, he would favor allocating its resources entirely toward AI data centers rather than mining.
His enthusiasm for AI investment is not unconditional. He said he expects Tesla and SpaceX to outperform Anthropic over the next five years, even while anticipating that leading AI developers could eventually become the world’s largest companies by market value.
Despite his shifting allocation toward AI, van der Chijs said Bitcoin remains the single asset he would choose to hold above all others.
“I think of all the assets you can hold, if there’s just one, it would be Bitcoin.”
