AI calculated Vitalik Buterin’s anonymous text - ForkLog

# AI Identified Vitalik Buterin's Anonymous Text

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that AI analysis by Co-Invest head Franklin Wan correctly identified the authorship of his anonymous revision of EIP-7503.

And … we have a winner!

My method when writing the post in 2024 was: I wrote it in Chinese, used qwen2.5 locally to translate it to English, then manually fixed all the bugs in the translation.

Notice that the stylistic hints that his AI picked up on were intellectual habits…— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 6, 2026

On June 22, Buterin launched a public experiment to test whether artificial intelligence truly threatens internet anonymity. He asked participants to find a document for Ethereum that he had published several years ago.

There have recently been claims that AI text analysis will make online anonymity untenable.

So let me cannibalize a piece of my own anonymity to do an experiment.

At some point this decade, I wrote a published document of medium importance to Ethereum — I estimate ~200 to 2000…— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 22, 2026

The winner was Wan. Using AI, his team determined that the programmer wrote an anonymous revision of EIP-7503 from December 2024. During the analysis, the specialists examined 27 texts and estimated Buterin's authorship probability at about 20% — a figure roughly ten times higher than that of the next candidate.

"The main signal was not his words, but his way of reasoning," Wan wrote after confirming the result.

Buterin said that he deliberately tried to hide his authorship: he wrote the document in Chinese, then translated it into English using Qwen 2.5 and manually corrected the text. However, the AI was able to identify him by the way he explained mathematical and technical ideas.

"The stylistic features that the AI detected were related to intellectual habits and the way of explaining algorithms, not to linguistic features," noted the Ethereum co-founder.

The experiment was prompted by a February report from researchers at ETH Zurich and Anthropic. The authors concluded that large language models are already capable of helping to de-anonymize internet users by analyzing texts from open sources and searching for related data.

Head of Lighter Vladimir Novakovsky noted that in 2023, together with Wan, he used a similar approach to try to identify the identity of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto by the style of cryptographic publications. However, the researchers were unable to obtain a result with high confidence. Later, Wan applied this method in Buterin's experiment.

Recall that in early July, the Ethereum co-founder presented the main priorities of the new roadmap for the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap. According to him, developers will focus on quantum resistance, privacy, scaling, and restructuring key protocol elements.