Coinbase fires IT staff for refusing to work with AI

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has fired some of the specialists from the IT department who refused to use artificial intelligence tools. This was announced by the head of the company Brian Armstrong in the podcast Cheeky Pint, recorded with Stripe co-founder John Collison.

He said the exchange has purchased enterprise licences for GitHub Copilot and Cursor, but has seen low adoption of the technologies. Armstrong emphasised that he expected programmers to adapt more quickly: ‘I wrote in Slack that AI was critical. By the end of the week, everyone had to have mastered the tools.”

Employees who, due to objective reasons (e.g., holidays) did not have time to fulfil the requirement were retained. Those who refused to implement AI without valid reasons, however, were fired. “Yes, it was a tough decision, but it brought clarity,” Coinbase’s CEO noted.

Armstrong estimates that about 33% of new code is already being created using AI. The company plans to increase this figure to 50% by the end of the quarter. At the same time, he emphasised that code written by artificial intelligence requires mandatory verification, especially in the field of payment infrastructure.

Coinbase is not the only company pushing for active AI adoption. Shopify has previously stated that it will only hire specialists who cannot be replaced by machine intelligence.