The crypto industry has spent years debating whether quantum computers pose an existential threat to blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, researchers and developers believe that artificial intelligence can accelerate that timeline and force a broader rethinking of how digital security works altogether.
Leaders working on post-quantum cryptography and blockchain security described a rapidly changing landscape where AI is simultaneously becoming a weapon for attackers, a defensive tool for developers and an accelerator for quantum computing research.
“The security landscape of the future is going to be different,” said Alex Pruden, CEO of Project Eleven, a company focused on quantum-resistant infrastructure for crypto.
“Between quantum and AI, we’re going to enter a world where security, and this is broader than just crypto, you just can’t count on the way you’ve always done things,” Pruden said.
The convergence of artificial intelligence and quantum computers has become increasingly urgent following warnings from major technology companies and researchers that cryptographically relevant quantum computers may arrive sooner than previously expected. While experts remain divided on exactly when a quantum computer capable of breaking modern encryption will emerge, many believe AI could dramatically compress development timelines.
“AI is certainly being used to accelerate the development of quantum computers,” Pruden said. Researchers are already using machine learning systems to optimize quantum error correction, one of the field’s biggest technical bottlenecks.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the NEAR Protocol and a former Google AI researcher, said AI has already been accelerating scientific discovery for years.
“AI is becoming more and more of an accelerator,” Polosukhin said. “The pace of research will accelerate from here, and we’ve already seen advances that people didn’t expect to come so early.”
Polosukhin pointed to his time at Google in 2016, when machine learning systems were already being used to discover new materials. “It may be that the next generation of quantum computers will be built with AI and quantum computers of this generation,” he said. “It feeds on itself.”
For security researchers, the threat is no longer just theoretical. The growing concern is that governments and sophisticated actors are already collecting encrypted Internet traffic today with the expectation that future quantum computers will eventually be able to decrypt it, a strategy often referred to as “harvest now, decrypt later.” “If I know quantum computers are coming in a few years, I’ll start trying to capture all the possible data that’s going on,” Polosukhin said.
“Everything we put on the Internet, if you can be identified as a person of interest, you can assume will be decrypted in two years,” he added. “It’s most likely already happening.”
The implications for crypto are particularly dire because most blockchain networks rely on the same elliptic curve cryptography used across the wider internet. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer can theoretically derive private keys from public keys, allowing attackers to compromise vulnerable wallets and systems.
But researchers are increasingly arguing that the bigger story isn’t quantum alone, it’s the combination of quantum computing and artificial intelligence that is creating a permanent security arms race.
Artificial intelligence is already becoming increasingly effective at identifying software vulnerabilities and implementation errors. “I would expect the rise of artificial intelligence to accelerate … even more hacks,” Pruden said. “You have these AI models that are either able to find implementation flaws in the underlying cryptography or increasingly, I think, break the cryptography itself.”
At the same time, developers are deploying AI defensively for code auditing, testing, and formal verification, mathematical techniques used to prove that software behaves as intended. “AI can help with formal verification of post-quantum systems,” Pruden said. “That theoretically makes them safer.”
The result, researchers say, is a future where security can no longer be treated as static infrastructure that gets upgraded once every decade. “Nothing will be as static as it has been in the future,” Pruden said. “Either a quantum computer comes online to break a fundamental assumption, or AI becomes smart enough to break that assumption.”
That shift is already beginning to force blockchain networks to rethink how quickly they can evolve. Several ecosystems, including Ethereum, Zcash, Solana, Ripple, and NEAR, are actively researching or implementing post-quantum migration strategies.
NEAR recently announced plans to integrate post-quantum cryptography directly into its account infrastructure, allowing users to rotate cryptographic schemes without migrating assets to entirely new wallets. “Back in 2018 when we designed [NEAR]we were like, ‘Hey, quantum is going to come, we should have an easy way to do it,'” Polosukhin said.
Still, the transition is technically difficult. Post-quantum cryptographic systems are often significantly larger and slower than current standards. “The cryptography currently standardized for post-quantum is very large and slow,” Polosukhin said.
The broader implication, according to researchers, is that both AI and quantum computing undermine a fundamental assumption of the digital age: that encryption remains reliable for long periods of time.
Instead, security can increasingly become an adaptive, continuously evolving process where systems must constantly be upgraded just to survive.
Read more: Here’s how bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks are preparing for the looming quantum threat
