The crypto industry has long debated whether quantum computing poses an existential threat to blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now researchers and builders believe artificial intelligence may be compressing that timeline, forcing a broader rethink of how digital security works.
AI speeds up quantum research, tightens timeline
Leaders in post-quantum cryptography and blockchain security describe a rapidly shifting landscape where AI is both a weapon for attackers, a defensive tool for developers, and an accelerator of quantum computing research. Alex Pruden, CEO of Project Eleven, a firm building quantum-resistant crypto infrastructure, said: "The security landscape of the future is going to be different. Between quantum and AI, we're going into a world where security—more broadly than just crypto—you simply cannot count on the way you've always done things." Pruden noted AI is already being used to optimize quantum error correction, one of the field's biggest engineering bottlenecks.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and former Google AI researcher, said AI has been accelerating scientific discovery for years. "AI is becoming more and more of an accelerator. The rate of research is going to accelerate from here, and we have already seen progress that people didn't expect would come this early." Polosukhin recalled that at Google in 2016, machine learning systems were already discovering new materials. "It might be that the next generation quantum computer will be built with AI and quantum computers of this generation. It's feeding into itself."
"Harvest now, decrypt later" strategy raises alarms
For security researchers, the threat is no longer purely theoretical. Growing concern centers on governments and sophisticated actors collecting encrypted internet traffic today, expecting future quantum computers to decrypt it—a "harvest now, decrypt later" approach. "If I know quantum computers are coming in a couple of years, I will start trying to capture all possible data that's going around," Polosukhin said. "Everything we're putting on the internet, if you're identifiable as a person of interest, you can assume will be decrypted in two years. It's most likely happening already."
Blockchain faces severe impact as AI can both attack and defend
The implications for crypto are particularly severe because most blockchains rely on the same elliptic curve cryptography used across the broader internet. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically derive private keys from public keys, compromising vulnerable wallets and systems. Researchers argue the bigger story is not quantum alone, but its combination with AI creating a permanent security arms race. AI is already highly effective at finding software vulnerabilities and implementation flaws. "I would expect the advent of AI to accelerate... even more hacks," Pruden said. "You have AI models able to find implementation bugs in the underlying cryptography or increasingly break the cryptography itself."
At the same time, developers are deploying AI defensively for code auditing, testing, and formal verification—mathematical techniques to prove software behaves as intended. "AI can help with formal verification of post-quantum systems," Pruden said. "That theoretically makes them more secure."
The result, researchers say, is a future where security can no longer be treated as static infrastructure upgraded once a decade. "Nothing is going to be as static as it's been in the future," Pruden said. "Either a quantum computer comes online to break some fundamental assumption, or AI gets smart enough to break that assumption too."