Coinbase Global (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong delivered an intriguing message to Wall Street about how it’s thinking about AI and the labor market on Thursday, telling investors that the rise of AI agents inside his firm is “a little bit like self-driving cars.”
“They’re getting to a place where they’re actually safer than human drivers,” Armstrong said.
“There will be a point, I think, in the future, where nontechnical people will be able to write code, AI agents will be able to review it and check it for security, [and] improve the quality of it. And actually, in certain situations, have it go to production, but that’s not yet the case today,” he said.
The comparison came in response to a question on the company’s post-earnings conference call about the risk Coinbase is taking by allowing AI to pick up more human tasks, particularly in the cybersecurity arena.
CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong is interviewed for CNBC in the Russell Senate office building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 15, 2026. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon · REUTERS / REUTERS
“We encourage product managers, designers, other nontechnical employees to use AI agents to draft code, that’s getting easier to do, but human engineers still review all code before it goes into production,” Armstrong clarified earlier in his answer.
Coinbase posted a wider-than-expected first quarter net loss on Thursday, marking the major crypto exchange’s second three-month period in the red since the crypto market began its slump last fall.
Days before, the major crypto firm joined the ranks of tech firms announcing job cuts this year citing AI. The company is reducing headcount by 14%, or 700 workers in light of “current market conditions” and the need to “optimize the Company’s operations for the AI era.”
Shares for Coinbase, the country’s biggest crypto exchange, fell 3% in pre-market trading Friday. At Thursday’s close, the stock was down 52% from its high last October.
Pull requests per engineer, a productivity metric for software developers, “is up almost 80% year-over-year, and importantly, our focus on quality is scaling even faster,” CFO Alesia Haas added during the Thursday call.
It’s unclear what exactly has caused digital assets to lag significantly while major stock indexes continue to hit record highs but the lower prices have since hit Coinbase’s crypto fee-earning potential meaningfully.
“We controlled what we could control,” Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas said in an interview on Thursday, adding that the firm grew its US spot crypto trading market share among other things during the period.
While Armstrong did not forecast an imminent crypto rebound, he did unspool his AI vision to Wall Street at the beginning of the earnings call. In the future, he expects billions of AI agents to make trades and send money, and the “only option” for filling that future world of finance is on the blockchain.