Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says he wants to boost the amount of AI-written code on his platform from 40% to 50%, threatening to fire employees who won’t use AI coding.
Summary
- Coinbase CEO wants 50% of its daily platform coding written by AI.
- Employees, especially engineers, who fail to onboard with AI coding tools risk termination.
Brian Armstrong is currently pushing Coinbase into an artificial intelligence-fueled revolution, by aiming to have at least 50% of the daily code written on the platform to be AI-generated by October 2025. So far, Armstrong claims that around 40% of the coding that’s powering the platform right now is AI-generated.
Though, he did acknowledge that the AI-generated codes would have to go through manual surveillance to make sure it’s going to work properly.
“Obviously it needs to be reviewed and understood, and not all areas of the business can use AI-generated code. But we should be using it responsibly as much as we possibly can,” said the Coinbase CEO in his recent post.
Armstrong was very serious about this AI revolution, to the point where he made the platform’s employees start using AI coding assistants after recently acquiring enterprise licenses for both GitHub Copilot and Cursor.
GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant plugin for existing code editors, focusing on quick, inline code suggestions and task completion. Meanwhile, Cursor is a specialized AI code editor built from the ground up on VS Code.
According to a GitHub survey of 500 U.S. developers at large companies, around 92% are already employing AI-driven coding tools such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor. These tools are either deployed during work or for their personal projects, while 70% report that these tools give them a competitive advantage in their daily tasks
Coinbase CEO fires employees who won’t use AI coding
Of course, Brian Armstrong realized it may take several quarters to fully onboard company’s computer engineers to start using AI coding tools. Meanwhile, he needed everyone onboard within a short time. So, he reportedly went on Slack and obligated every engineer to onboard by the end of the week.
“We need you to all learn it and at least onboard. You don’t have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least onboard by the end of the week,” said Armstrong as quoted by Fortune.
“And if not, I’m hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn’t done it, and I’d like to meet with you to understand why,” he added.
During the Saturday meeting, Armstrong questioned each employee that failed to onboard with the AI coding programs. The ones who had a good reason were allowed to stay, those that didn’t allegedly got fired.
Coinbase had not responded to Fortune’s request for comment.
Armstrong has been particularly bullish on AI adoption, especially in the workforce. And he’s not the only one. In fact, many CEOs from firms like Google, Microsoft, Shopify and other tech companies have been mandating and strongly urging its employees to use AI.
Most recently, Galaxy Digital CEO Michael Novogratz has expressed optimism on AI’s role in boosting the stablecoin usage as more and more integration between AI and crypto start to surface. Novogratz believes that AI Agents will become the biggest users of stablecoin, which will lead to an explosive amount of transactions within the market.
Back in March 2025, vibe coding became a hot topic among start-ups and tech companies as wannabe-developers began using AI to build applications and tools without prior knowledge of coding. All they needed to do was ask AI to generate the code they needed. Many were able to build their own applications and projects based around the “vibe coding.” method.
