OpenAI and Paradigm launch EVMbench for AI smart-contract security

OpenAI and crypto venture firm Paradigm have launched EVMbench, a benchmark suite intended to measure how well AI models find and reason about smart‑contract vulnerabilities on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), according to Bitcoin.com.

Benchmarks sound boring until you notice what they do: they define reality. Once a benchmark becomes a de facto standard, it quietly dictates what “security” means, which failure modes count, and what kind of tooling gets funded. In smart contracts—where the whole point is permissionless deployment and adversarial execution—this is not a neutral act.

Bitcoin.com reports that EVMbench is framed as a way to evaluate AI smart‑contract security. The premise is that large language models are increasingly used to write, review, and audit Solidity and EVM bytecode-adjacent logic; if they can be measured, they can be improved. In theory, better automated review could reduce the endless parade of reentrancy bugs, access‑control mistakes, integer edge cases, oracle manipulation, and the more modern genre of “composable finance” foot‑guns.

But in crypto, measurement can metastasize into compliance. A benchmark suite can morph from “research tool” into procurement checkbox: auditors, exchanges, insurers, and regulators love anything that looks like an objective score. The risk is that EVMbench becomes a standard not because it captures the full threat model, but because it is legible to institutions.

That would tilt the ecosystem toward players who can afford benchmark‑optimized pipelines—large audit firms, big protocols, and well‑funded teams—while smaller builders get told their code is “unsafe” because it doesn’t satisfy the latest scoring rubric. Permissionless innovation gets replaced by permissionless paperwork.

There is also an incentive problem. If AI models are trained and tuned against a public benchmark, they will learn the benchmark’s distribution—what kinds of bugs appear, how they’re phrased, what patterns are rewarded. Attackers will learn it too, and will happily move to the blind spots. “Security” becomes a game of teaching models to pass tests, while adversaries keep writing new questions.

None of this makes EVMbench useless. Crypto security is a genuine problem, and systematic evaluation beats vibes. But the industry should treat benchmarks like protocols: contested, forkable, and resistant to capture. Otherwise, the people who set the benchmark will end up setting the market—and, by extension, the boundaries of what smart contracts are allowed to be.