Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Talks Encryption to Counter AI Surveillance

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is raising new concerns over digital privacy, especially as artificial intelligence becomes more effective at collecting and analyzing personal data. In a detailed blog post, Buterin stresses that the need to protect user privacy is growing rapidly, and tools to do so must keep pace.

Good to know:

• Vitalik Buterin highlights growing privacy concerns linked to AI data collection.
• He supports tools like zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption.
• He warns of an imbalance where powerful actors gain access while ordinary people lose privacy.

He points to technologies like zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and code obfuscation as vital tools in the digital privacy toolbox. These solutions, he notes, go far beyond what early internet privacy advocates from the 1990s could have predicted.

We may be literally talking about AI reading our minds.

Buterin says the world is moving into an era where not just governments or corporations, but AI systems themselves, can access and process vast amounts of personal data. In some cases, he warns, we may even face scenarios where machines are trained to interpret human thoughts through brain-computer interfaces.

“AI is greatly increasing capabilities for centralized data collection and analysis while greatly expanding the scope of data that we share voluntarily,” he writes. “We may be literally talking about AI reading our minds.”

He also argues that the real risk lies in the unequal access to data. While tech giants and state agencies may have powerful tools to gather insights, average users may find themselves exposed with little control. According to Buterin, “the most pressing risk of near-future technology is that privacy will approach all-time lows, and in a highly imbalanced way.”

While he acknowledges that certain entities—such as large corporations or people in power—may require less privacy, he warns against allowing that logic to trickle down to everyday users. Without safeguards, people may begin to censor themselves out of fear of judgment, both from other humans and automated systems.

Buterin emphasizes the importance of making privacy tools widely accessible and open source, saying it’s vital that solutions are not limited to only the tech elite. “Supporting privacy for everyone, and making the necessary tools open-source, universal, reliable and safe is one of the important challenges of our time,” he says.