Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong is taking an uncompromising approach to artificial intelligence, pushing the company to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) at a pace few other crypto or other fintech firms have attempted.
In an interview with John Collison, the Coinbase CEO says the firm is moving aggressively to embed AI across its engineering ranks, with no patience for gradual rollouts or hesitant employees.
Armstrong explains that leadership had floated a plan to phase in AI tools like Copilot and Cursor over several quarters, but he personally intervened to accelerate the timeline. What followed was a mandate that left no room for resistance.
“We are leaning as hard as we can into AI…
We made a big push to get every engineer on Cursor and Copilot. And then another question was, well, are they actually going to use it? Because a lot of them onboarded…
And I posted in the all-in Slack channel. Just a light dusting of founder mode. Yeah, I was like, ‘AI is important, we need you to all learn it, and at least onboard. You don’t have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least onboard by the end of the week.’
Anyway, I jumped on this call on Saturday, and there were a couple people that had not done it.
Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn’t, and they got fired. Some people really didn’t like it, by the way, that heavy-handed approach, but I think it did set some clarity, at least, that we need to lean into this and learn about it.”
Armstrong also says that Coinbase is now doing speed runs to train employees how to use AI.
“One thing we started doing is every month we host, we call it an AI speed run where someone, one of the engineers, volunteers that month to run a training for how they’re using it. And we try to cherry-pick the people, the teams that are doing it the best. And, you know, we’re doing about, I think it’s about 33% of code written by AI now. We have a goal to get to 50% by the end of the quarter…
You don’t want people vibe coding these systems, moving money. And so we’ve really encouraged people to really you have to code review it and have the appropriate checks in place on that with humans in the loop.”
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at CapitalAI Daily are not investment advice. Investors should do their own due diligence before making any decisions involving securities, cryptocurrencies, or digital assets. Your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility. CapitalAI Daily does not recommend the buying or selling of any assets, nor is CapitalAI Daily an investment advisor. See our Editorial Standards and Terms of Use.