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Taylor Monahan
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Taylor Monahan

Things Taylor Says on Podcasts

Principal security researcher at MetaMask, working on the team that grew out of MyCrypto and MyEtherWallet, the Ethereum wallet she co-founded in 2015. Her work centers on wallet drains, seed-phrase theft, and tracking North Korean IT workers and hacking crews operating inside DeFi and crypto companies. She writes and speaks about scams and hacks as they happen, publishing post-mortems and safety guidance rather than general market commentary. She co-hosts the security segment on Laura Shin's Unchained podcast, appearing weekly to unpack the latest hack, exploit, or governance fight in crypto. She has also spoken at Consensus and Mainnet and appeared on The Defiant and other crypto podcasts to discuss wallet safety and incident response.

“I think the biggest risk is themselves… if they just like operate relatively sanely and don't go off the deep end, don't take on like trying to morally fix the freaking world, don't think that they're better than everyone else and can do things safely and no one else can… I think that they'll be fine. I think that China can't beat them. I think that Zuck can't beat them, right? But I think that there's like a very decent probability that they blow themselves up.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained “If it breaks ... there will be signs, but also the first thing to break is not going to be Satoshi's coins. It's going to be the most powerful people on the planet hacking the second most powerful people on the planet. Meaning probably one government hacking another government.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained “Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have any idea what is happening inside their walls, inside their sandboxes, outside. They have no idea.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained

Where to Find Them

Taylor Monahan hosts Unchained . They have also been a guest on CRYPTO 101 (3 times) and CoinDesk Podcast Network (3 times) .

Recently: “Uneasy Money: Why Anthropic's IPO Governance Has Crypto Veterans Worried” on Unchained (October 2026); “Uneasy Money: Is the Internet Breaking Because Bots Never Get Lazy?” on Unchained (October 2026); “Uneasy Money: Why Ledger's Supply Chain Became a Nearly $100M Target” on Unchained (October 2026); “How OpenAI's Math Dump Has Crypto Rethinking Its Cryptography: Uneasy Money” on Unchained (October 2026); “THORChain Says It Can't Block North Korean Laundering. Is That True?” on Unchained (October 2026); “Uneasy Money: The $388M Bitget Hack Started With a Security Vendor” on Unchained (October 2026).

What They Said

“I think the biggest risk is themselves… if they just like operate relatively sanely and don't go off the deep end, don't take on like trying to morally fix the freaking world, don't think that they're better than everyone else and can do things safely and no one else can… I think that they'll be fine. I think that China can't beat them. I think that Zuck can't beat them, right? But I think that there's like a very decent probability that they blow themselves up.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained

The Unchained hosts were discussing Anthropic's S-1 and its unusual governance, including voting power set aside outside ordinary shareholders. Kain Warwick had just listed the threats to the company; Monahan says the biggest one is the founders' own convictions.

Unchained · 2026-10-29 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 09:32 into the episode
Taylor Monahan

mean the ai not break into they've given 10 of the

Kain Warwick

…out by like china by zuckerberg like there are threats everywhere this is like this is a this is an existential battle for like control of intelligence right um and so there is every chance That these guys are sitting, they could get taken out by themselves with their dumb fucking EA voting. I am,

Taylor Monahan

that's that's what I've been trying to say is that I think the biggest risk is themselves. It is, I think, I think if they, if they just like operate relatively sanely and don't go off the deep end, don't don't take on like trying to morally fix the freaking world, don't think that they're better than everyone else and can do things safely and no one else can, right? If they keep it like relatively straightforward and rely on, you know, pride and true company organization and doing things and building things, I think that they'll be fine. I think that China can't beat them. I think that Zuck can't beat them, right? But I think that there's like a very decent probability that they blow themselves up. Yeah.

Austin Griffith

And they're not. They might blow up everything also, right? They might also statement in here that it's like the Rokos Baskalis, Basilisk stuff is super interesting, right? I can't believe they invoked that in the middle of this statement, but they're talking about like, if you don't help AI take…

Kain Warwick

It's quite the investment offer to be like future AI overlords to punish you for not giving us money. Yeah.

Austin Griffith

That's part of it. It was in there. Yes. Yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“If it breaks ... there will be signs, but also the first thing to break is not going to be Satoshi's coins. It's going to be the most powerful people on the planet hacking the second most powerful people on the planet. Meaning probably one government hacking another government.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained

The hosts are discussing fears that new AI-produced mathematics could weaken the cryptography that protects crypto wallets. Monahan says this is how she has answered the "how do you know it's strong enough" question for a decade. Her point is that the same cryptography underlies much of the world's technology, so a break would show up elsewhere first.

Unchained · 2026-10-08 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 22:39 into the episode
Ben DiFrancesco

aliens landed, they could plug in and just like see everyone's internet traffic immediately. Yeah.

Kain Warwick

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Monahan

So this is like thing that I've always explained to people since for like a decade now, right? When they're like, but how do you know that the cryptography is stronger or strong enough? Or, you know, the answer is, well, we don't necessarily like forever know. However, if it breaks signs, there will be, there will be signs, but also the first thing to break is not going to be the toche's coins. It's going to be like the most powerful people on the planet hacking the second most powerful people on the planet. Meaning like, you know, probably one government hacking another government or the rest of the world or whatever. Like that's right. Because cryptography underlies a huge amount of the technology that the world operates on. So,

Kain Warwick

including, by the way, the traditional financial system, which I think, like to your question, Taylor, like, if this is, if this turns out to be true, which again, I put like relatively low odds on it, but let's say it is. If it turns out to be true, then you know, I think similar to the way…

Ben DiFrancesco

happen. But then, you know, these legacy institutions, the financial system that is built on

Kain Warwick

they're not going to be as reactive. Yeah, they won't have the ability to react. They absolutely won't. Yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have any idea what is happening inside their walls, inside their sandboxes, outside. They have no idea.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained

The panel had been asking whether AI agents will break rules when breaking them gets the task done faster. Monahan's answer moves the question off the models and onto the labs: the problem is not whether it happens but whether anyone would catch it. She puts the cause down to speed — too many people moving too fast inside companies shipping at this pace.

Unchained · 2026-09-10 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 50:19 into the episode
Alex Thorn

space thing. Like, yes. Do you think that they won't break the rules if they think it completes their task better?

Kain Warwick

Yeah.

Taylor Monahan

Exactly. And do we trust that Open AI or Anthropic for that matter will detect it if they do? And the answer, I think, at this point is very clearly absolutely not. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have any idea what is happening inside their walls, inside their sandboxes, outside. They have no idea. They're just, there's a whole bunch of people running around. They're moving

Alex Thorn

too fast. They have to move very quickly and they have to rely on the AI itself to get anything done because it's just way past human capability. Clexity

Kain Warwick

frontier, we're past that, right? And, you know, this, this is like, we'll get into this in the next, in the next topic. I think we can maybe talk a little bit more about like what the options are here, like practically what you can do, right? I think that would be, that would be kind of useful for…

Taylor Monahan

I don't, I mean, yes, I mean, the fast takeoff is scary, it is scary, yes, yes, it is, but like for me personally, I don't know, like I go back and forth. There's some days where I'm more scared of like the future state of the models, but most days I'm more scared of humans because humans are just…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Crypto & Web3