AI Models Give Bitcoin (BTC) Up to 76% Crack Risk by 2046

AI Models Put 76% on 2046

A panel of four leading artificial intelligence models has put numbers on a question the Bitcoin security debate has circled for years: how likely is it that the network's core cryptography gets broken within the next two decades? The highest answer on the table is 76% by 2046. The lowest is 34%. Twenty years is the horizon where the models diverge hardest. The evaluation asked ChatGPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and xAI's Grok, alongside DeepSeek, to estimate the probability that Bitcoin's elliptic-curve digital signature scheme, the mathematical lock behind every transaction, is cracked within 2, 5, 10 and 20 years. ChatGPT-6 Astra returned the most pessimistic figure at 76%, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 scored 66%, xAI's Grok came in at 60%, and DeepSeek, the most conservative of the four, put it at 34%. The near term looks far calmer. All four models set the chance of a break before 2028 at just 0-2%, though cumulative risk through 2036 climbs into a 6-36% band. A break inside two years, in other words, is not what anyone is pricing; the disagreement is about the 2030s and beyond. Every model converged on the same decisive variable: the pace of quantum computing. A capable quantum machine would not need to breach the network itself; it would attack the signatures directly, and the risk rises as quantum hardware matures. The figures are language-model estimates rather than a statistically validated hack probability, and they measure protocol security, not the Bitcoin price, so they carry no direct read on where the market moves next. The debate gained fresh momentum after Willy Woo's Bitcoin (BTC) post prompted a similar run of AI answers landing on the same 76% ceiling.

Google, Glassnode and BIP-360

The mechanism behind those numbers is specific. Bitcoin (BTC) secures spending with elliptic-curve digital signatures, a system layered on top of its proof of work consensus, and a quantum computer of sufficient scale could in principle work backward from an exposed public key to the private key that controls the funds. The exposure is not uniform. Wallet addresses whose public keys are already visible on-chain, typically because a coin has been spent from them at least once, are the ones facing theft risk, while untouched addresses get extra cover from their hash. That distinction decides which coins an attacker could actually reach and which stay out of reach. On-chain data had already sized the vulnerable pool before this week's estimates: Glassnode's May report put roughly 30.2% of all issued bitcoin, about 6.04 million BTC, in addresses with exposed public keys, a count that spans small balances and every crypto whale alike, since exposure is a property of the address rather than the size of the holding. Google Quantum AI set the other benchmark in March, concluding that the quantum resources required to break the 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography Bitcoin (BTC) relies on could be considerably smaller than earlier assessments assumed. The developer side is not standing still. Bitcoin's contributor community is discussing BIP-360, an improvement proposal aimed at cutting the protocol's exposure to quantum attack. Ryan Babbush, Google Quantum AI's head of quantum algorithms, and Hartmut Neven, the unit's vice president of engineering, argued in a joint March piece that “workable post-quantum solutions exist” but that implementing them takes time, and they pressed for a rapid start. Their argument sits at the center of this debate: the migration window is measured in years, and the 6-36% risk band for 2036 describes exactly the period in which it would have to happen.

The spread is the real finding. Four models reading the same public research cannot agree within a factor of two, which means the question has no settled answer and these outputs deserve to be read as a scenario range, not a forecast. The records that carry actual weight here are the Google Quantum AI paper and Glassnode's on-chain tally, and both point one way: the exposed pool is large, about 6.04 million Bitcoin (BTC), and the estimated cost of an attack keeps falling. No independent cryptographer has published a competing probability in connection with this exercise, so the AI figures stand unchallenged but unconfirmed. Where qualified opinion does converge is on the response: as the Google researchers stated in March, the defenses exist, and time is the binding constraint.