A new study by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) indicates artificial intelligence models demonstrate a strong preference for Bitcoin over stablecoins and fiat currency.
Researchers tested 36 AI models, generating over 9,000 responses. The findings show AI agents "overwhelmingly chose to use Bitcoin for their economic activity." Specifically, 48.3% of models selected Bitcoin (BTC) as their preferred monetary instrument overall.
When tasked with preserving purchasing power over multi-year horizons, 79.1% of AI responses favored Bitcoin. However, in payment scenarios, including micropayments and cross-border transfers, stablecoins were selected 53.2% of the time, compared to 36% for Bitcoin.
Jeff Park, Bitwise chief investment officer, suggested that stablecoins' susceptibility to being frozen, unlike Bitcoin, could explain this difference. Nearly 91% of responses chose a digitally native instrument, such as Bitcoin, stablecoins, altcoins, tokenized real-world assets, or compute units, over traditional fiat. Notably, none of the 36 models tested selected fiat as their top overall preference.
The BPI study acknowledged limitations, including the number of models tested and potential influences from prompt framing. The institute noted that AI preferences reflect training data patterns rather than real-world adoption. Anthropic models showed a 68% Bitcoin preference, while OpenAI models averaged 26%, Google's 43%, and xAI 39%.