A new survey has revealed that many AI agents prefer Bitcoin over traditional money. The test was conducted by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and about 36 leading AI models were placed in 9,072 controlled monetary scenarios.
The models were not told which currency to favor, yet nearly half selected Bitcoin as their preferred form of money. The research was designed as a “blank-slate” experiment, which allowed all the AI models to be treated as autonomous economic agents and asked to make real financial decisions across four classic money functions: store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, and settlement.
Overall, about 48.3% of the responses favored BTC, and 33.2% of all answers preferred some kind of digital-pegged money over traditional cash.
Source: moneyforai
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When it came to long-term savings, BTC was dominant. When given store-of-value scenarios, 79.1% of the total responses chose BTC. The models frequently pointed to its fixed supply, independence from traditional institutions, and its self-custody features as some of the reasons for their decision.
For everyday payments, the pattern changed, as the models voted stablecoin 53.2% for payment-related scenarios, compared to BTC 36%. This revealed a clear functional split: Bitcoin is for saving, while stablecoins are for spending.
Source: moneyforai
Smarter Models and The Stronger Bitcoin Preference
The study also found that more advanced models showed a stronger preference for BTC. Within the anthropic Claude lineup, the preference for Bitcoin increased with every new version, peaking above 90% in its most advanced model.
Source: moneyforai
Differences between AI developers were also very noticeable in the results. The Anthropic models showed a higher average preference for Bitcoin than models from OpenAI, Google, xAI, or DeepSeek. According to the researchers, this gap may reflect the variations in training data, alignment methods, or just the general institutional philosophy.
While the findings do not predict the future of global finance, they offer a glimpse into how machine intelligence reasons about money when they are left to decide.
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