Chainalysis Launches AI-Powered ‘Blockchain Intelligence Agents’ to Counter Surging Crypto Crime

Chainalysis unveiled AI agents at its Links conference, racing to match the criminals already using the technology to scale fraud and laundering.

Chainalysis announced the launch of “blockchain intelligence agents” at its annual Links conference in New York on Tuesday, marking the biggest platform shift in the company’s history. The agents are designed to put the full depth of Chainalysis’s dataset, which the company says has powered over 10 million investigations and screened billions of transactions, into the hands of anyone in an organization, not only trained analysts.

The move reflects a broader industry reckoning with the speed at which bad actors have weaponized AI. Illicit crypto flows reached an estimated $158 billion in 2025, and AI-enabled scams surged roughly 500% year over year, according to data from Chainalysis and TRM Labs. Autonomous criminal networks now compress money laundering timelines from days to seconds by using AI to automate fund splitting, bridge selection, and cross-chain swaps.

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Chainalysis is not alone in responding. TRM Labs, valued at $1 billion after a $70 million Series C in February, launched its own AI investigative assistant, Co-Case Agent, on March 25. That tool translates plain-language prompts into complex on-chain tracing actions and ships at no extra cost to existing customers. The parallel launches underscore that blockchain analytics is entering an agentic era, where the core value proposition shifts from data access to AI-assisted interpretation at scale.

Chainalysis, valued at $8.6 billion, said it built its agents around four principles: data quality, domain-specific reasoning, auditable and deterministic outputs for regulated decisions, and human oversight. The company emphasized that its data has been ruled reliable and admissible in court, a distinction it positions as a competitive moat for high-stakes use cases.

The agents will begin rolling out over the summer, starting with investigations and compliance workflows. Chainalysis said it expects adoption to expand into broader organizational roles over time.