Coinbase Says AI Now Writes 95-100% of Its Code

Coinbase’s head of platform, Rob Witoff, said in an interview this week that artificial intelligence now writes or assists in writing between 95% and 100% of the exchange’s code, a sharp increase from 40% in February. The disclosure highlights how deeply AI has penetrated the Nasdaq-listed crypto firm’s engineering operations.

According to Witoff, most Coinbase engineers now run five to ten AI agents concurrently to compose, test, and review software, effectively matching the output of roughly 1,200 human employees. He added that nearly all employees use AI tools daily. The adoption pace has been striking, with the share of AI-written code more than doubling in about five months.

The company has implemented a tiered approach to automation. Core cryptography—the security-sensitive code protecting customer funds—still relies mainly on human developers due to the high cost of errors. Prototyping, on the other hand, is fully automated. System management tasks fall in between, balancing human oversight with machine efficiency.

Witoff also outlined a long-term forecast: by 2030, Coinbase’s AI agents could perform the equivalent work of 100,000 employees, roughly 25 times the company’s current headcount. The projection underscores the exchange’s bet that agentic AI can scale far beyond today’s coding assistants.

The announcement comes as Coinbase deepens its involvement in AI infrastructure. It recently joined the x402 Foundation, a Linux Foundation body standardizing payments for AI agents, alongside Ripple, Visa, and Mastercard.

Critics caution that metrics like “code written with AI” can range from autocomplete suggestions to fully autonomous pull requests, making cross-company comparisons difficult. Witoff’s 95–100% figure covers that entire spectrum. Regardless of definitions, the trend is clear: an exchange that measured AI’s code contribution at 40% in winter now finds that nearly every line has machine involvement.