Marc van der Chijs, an entrepreneur who co-founded then bitcoin miner Hut 8 (HUT), has become increasingly concerned about the technology to which the company has pivoted: artificial intelligence.
“I’ve become more of a doomer over the past week, to be honest,” he told CoinDesk in an interview.
The concern marks a shift for an investor who compares AI’s potential today with bitcoin when he entered the market in 2013. He still expects the technology to transform the economy, but increasingly questions whether humans can retain control over its development.
“We have lost control, actually,” he said. “And until we get the control back, I’m actually worried that we’re moving too fast.”
Van der Chijs’s shift toward a “doomer” outlook mirrors warnings issued by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who urged tech leaders to slow the pace of frontier AI development. Amodei similarly cautioned that rapid progress—driven by AI models recursively improving themselves—risks exceeding human control and causing widespread infrastructure damage.
Both men point to the same structural trap: an intense competitive race between companies and nation-states that penalizes individual restraint, making systemic disruption or catastrophic failure seem almost inevitable before true international guardrails are established.
AI exposing vulnerabilities
Van der Chihs fears a major disruption, potentially affecting financial systems or critical infrastructure, may be needed before governments cooperate.
The concern extends to banks. Van der Chijs believes AI could expose vulnerabilities in legacy banking software, threatening confidence in institutions that depend on interconnected systems. Within crypto, he sees exchanges and other businesses built around bitcoin as more vulnerable than the underlying network.
His concerns have not displaced an expansive view of AI’s economic potential. He predicts AI and robotics could eventually perform 90% to 95% of existing jobs, while driving sharp declines in the cost of goods and services.
In that scenario, governments would need new sources of revenue as employment changes. He suggested taxes on robots or AI token usage, while acknowledging that locally run models would complicate collection.
His own portfolio has already followed the technology’s rise.
“I sold a lot of my bitcoin. I went into AI,” he said.
Van der Chijs believes that investors redirecting capital toward AI helped keep bitcoin below the $200,000 to $250,000 levels he and others had anticipated. He is now allocating some AI profits back into crypto, primarily through exchange-traded funds.
He also sees a stronger business case for AI infrastructure than for bitcoin mining. Speaking in a personal capacity, he described Hut 8’s move into AI as “the best move ever” and said that, if he were running the company today, he would favor allocating entirely to AI data centers.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.