Charles Guillemet, CTO of Ledger, warns that artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the economics of cyberattacks in the crypto space—making them significantly cheaper, faster, and more scalable.

According to him, AI is eroding a core principle of cybersecurity: the asymmetry where defense was traditionally easier than offense. In the past, executing sophisticated attacks—such as reverse engineering software or chaining multiple vulnerabilities—required highly skilled experts working for months. With modern AI tools, these same tasks can now be completed in seconds or minutes, drastically reducing the cost barrier and enabling a wider range of attackers to participate.

At the same time, AI is also creating new risks on the development side. As engineers increasingly rely on AI-generated code, security flaws can be unintentionally introduced and rapidly propagated across projects. This amplifies systemic risk, especially in crypto, where a single vulnerability in smart contracts or infrastructure can lead to large-scale financial losses.

To address these challenges, Guillemet argues that the industry must move beyond traditional code audits, which primarily focus on identifying known vulnerabilities. Instead, he advocates for formal verification—a method that uses mathematical proofs to guarantee that code behaves exactly as intended under all conditions. This approach, while more complex and resource-intensive, offers a higher level of assurance against increasingly sophisticated, AI-powered threats.

For individual users, he stresses that security fundamentals still matter. In particular, hardware wallets—devices that store private keys offline and are not connected to the internet—remain one of the most reliable defenses against remote attacks, even as the threat landscape evolves with AI.