Hut 8 co-founder who sold bitcoin for AI now worries the technology has slipped out of human control

Marc van der Chijs, the entrepreneur who co-founded bitcoin miner Hut 8, has spent recent weeks growing alarmist about the very technology the company has since pivoted into: artificial intelligence. "I've become more of a doomer over the past week, to be honest," he told CoinDesk in an interview.

It is a notable reversal for an investor who has described AI today as analogous to bitcoin when he first bought into it in 2013. He still believes the technology will reshape the economy. What he now doubts is whether anyone can steer it. "We have lost control, actually," he said. "And until we get the control back, I'm actually worried that we're moving too fast."

His warnings land alongside similar statements from Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who has pressed tech leaders to slow frontier AI development, arguing that self-improving models risk outrunning human oversight and damaging infrastructure at scale. Both men identify the same underlying dynamic: a race among companies and governments in which unilateral restraint is punished, making serious disruption likely before any genuine international rules exist. Van der Chijs fears it may take a major shock, possibly to financial systems or critical infrastructure, to force governments to the table.

Banking is in his crosshairs

The risks he flags are not abstract. He thinks AI could expose weaknesses in the aging software underpinning much of the banking sector, shaking confidence in institutions whose operations depend on tightly linked systems. Crypto, in his view, is exposed too, though unevenly: he considers exchanges and bitcoin-adjacent businesses more fragile than the bitcoin network itself.

None of this has dimmed his economic forecast. He expects AI and robotics to take over 90% to 95% of existing jobs and to push the cost of goods and services sharply lower. That transition would leave governments hunting for new revenue, and he floated taxes on robots or on AI token usage as possible answers, while conceding that locally hosted models would make such levies hard to collect.

His pessimism about AI safety is, in a sense, tangled up with his crypto portfolio. Capital flowing into AI, he believes, is one reason bitcoin has fallen short of the $200,000 to $250,000 range he and others had projected. He is now moving some of his AI gains back into crypto, mainly via exchange-traded funds.

On the business side, he remains convinced the AI buildout is the stronger trade. Speaking in a personal capacity, he called Hut 8's shift into AI "the best move ever" and said that were he still running the company, he would put its capital fully into AI data centers rather than mining.

He draws a line between enthusiasm for the sector and faith in individual names, though. Over the next five years, he expects Tesla and SpaceX to beat Anthropic as investments, even while anticipating that top AI labs could end up the world's most valuable companies. And when forced to pick a single asset to hold for life, he does not hesitate: "I think of all the assets you can hold, if there's just one, it would be bitcoin."