AI Identifies Vitalik Buterin as Author of EIP-7503

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has confirmed that an AI-assisted analysis successfully identified his anonymous authorship of a technical document, concluding a two-week public experiment on the durability of online anonymity. The identification was made by CoInvest CEO Franklyn Wang, who pinpointed Buterin as the author of an anonymous rewrite of Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7503 (EIP-7503).

Buterin initiated the challenge on June 22, stating he had published a document of "medium importance" to Ethereum under a different name and invited the public to find it. The experiment was designed to test recent claims that AI text analysis could make online anonymity untenable. On July 6, Wang announced his successful submission, which Buterin subsequently confirmed.

Wang's analysis focused on an anonymous December 2024 revision to EIP-7503, a proposal related to zero-knowledge cryptography. His system analyzed 27 documents and ranked Buterin as the most likely author with approximately 20% confidence, a figure about ten times higher than the next candidate. Wang stated the identification succeeded not because of surface-level prose but due to the underlying reasoning patterns...