Vitalik wrote a proposal to teach you how to secretly use AI big models Author: Deep Tide TechFlow. The world is talking about AI, and the voices about encryption on the timeline have become quieter. Meanwhile, ETH has been hovering around 2000 for almost two months, and it seems that not many people pay attention to what Vitalik says and does. But I recently checked his X and found that it's not just us who are affected by AI. In the past month, a large part of the things he posted were related to AI, and they were specific to the level of technical solutions. The most noteworthy one is a proposal he and Davide Crapis, the AI director of the Ethereum Foundation, jointly submitted on ethresear.ch on February 11th, titled "ZK API Usage Credits". In one sentence, it means: using zero knowledge proofs to enable you to anonymously call AI models. Now whether you use ChatGPT or call Claude's API, there is only one payment method: register an account, bind an email, and bind a credit card. Every conversation and prompt you make, the platform knows it was you who sent it. What did you ask, when did you ask, and how many times did you ask, all tied to your true identity. Vitalik and Crapis' proposal provides another path. The user deposits a sum of money into the smart contract, such as 100 USDC. The contract will register this deposit in an encrypted list on the chain. Afterwards, every time you call the API, you don't need to show your identity, just generate a zero knowledge proof that can prove two things to the service provider: you are on the list and your balance is still sufficient. But the proof itself does not reveal which one you are on the list. Service providers can receive money and prevent abuse, but they never know who you are from beginning to end. You can understand this proposal as one thing, Vitalik believes that in the AI age, users should not surrender their identity just to use an AI tool. This proposal is still in the research stage and there is still a distance to go before it can be implemented. Large model manufacturers may not agree to this approach; The comment section of the proposal is also filled with rebuttals and doubts, believing that AI model factories always have a way to know your true identity. But in my opinion, the significance of this proposal does not solely lie in whether it can be implemented on its own. Privacy is something Vitalik has been doing for ten years. From early support for Tornado Cash to promoting zero knowledge proof as the core technology roadmap of Ethereum, this line has never been broken. Just in the past few years, privacy in the context of the encryption industry has always lacked a big enough story to sustain it. AI has added this story. When you say more to the big model every day than to anyone else, privacy is a real need. Vitalik embraces AI. From February until now, a considerable portion of what Vitalik has posted on X is related to AI, with a high density that doesn't seem like a casual chat. Yesterday he posted a long post saying that he had recently attended a cryptography conference where people were concerned about privacy, open source, and censorship resistance But I have no feelings for blockchain. Among that group of people, he conducted a thought experiment: forget about 'we are the Ethereum community' and start from scratch to think about where Ethereum is most useful. His conclusion is that the fundamental value of Ethereum is to serve as a bulletin board. A place where anyone can write, anyone can read, no one can change, and no one can delete. In the context of AI, this may be the most important sentence Vitalik has said in the past two years. We are entering an era of infinitely cheap generation. Text, images, videos, and identities can all be mass-produced by AI. When everything can be forged, what becomes scarce? These questions will ultimately point to the same place: an open, persistent, and irreversible data layer. And a record that no one can tamper with is exactly what Ethereum can do. In the past two years, the doubts faced by Ethereum can be summed up in one sentence: What else can't be replaced by others? Now it seems that Vitalik did not answer this question directly. However, the Ethereum Foundation has done a few inconspicuous things in the past year: formed a privacy team of 50 people, established a privacy research cluster of nearly 50 people, released the Kohaku privacy framework, and specifically appointed an AI leader; In the 2026 roadmap, institutional level privacy and faster transaction confirmation are listed as the top priorities. Looking back at his intensive output over the past month, most of it has been discussing the privacy and efficiency issues of Ethereum in the context of AI. I think Vitalik is betting on one thing: the stronger the AI, the more rigid the demand for privacy and verification infrastructure will be. Whether Ethereum can meet this demand is another matter, but it has clearly chosen the right table. ETH is still hovering around 2000. Most people still don't pay much attention to what he's been saying lately. But perhaps in a few years, looking back, what should be concerned about now is this period of time.