Key facts
- Vitalik Buterin confirmed AI analysis correctly identified his anonymous contribution to an Ethereum proposal.
- The AI analysis was conducted by Co-Invest CEO Franklyn Wang.
- Buterin had issued a public challenge two weeks prior to test AI's deanonymization capabilities.
- The identified contribution was a rewrite of EIP-7503, originally written in Chinese and machine-translated.
- The AI identified Buterin by analyzing his mathematical and technical explanation patterns.
Vitalik Buterin has confirmed that an AI-assisted analysis correctly identified his anonymous contribution to an Ethereum proposal, concluding a two-week public challenge he initiated to test the capabilities of artificial intelligence in piercing online anonymity.
Franklyn Wang, CEO of Co-Invest, successfully identified an anonymous rewrite of EIP-7503, which Buterin had attempted to obscure by writing it in Chinese and then machine-translating it into English. Wang's analysis, which examined the way mathematical and technical concepts were explained, ultimately pinpointed Buterin based on his distinct intellectual habits and reasoning style, bypassing Buterin's prose-based obfuscation strategy.
Buterin's challenge was partly inspired by a February paper from researchers at ETH Zurich and Anthropic, which claimed that large language models could make online deanonymization practical at scale by extracting identity-related information from unstructured text. Wang's AI ranked Buterin as the most likely author of the anonymous document with approximately 20% confidence, significantly higher than any other candidate.