Vitalik posts twice in one day: Ethereum needs to resist censorship, AI should listen to humans

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin discusses the synergistic effects of FOCIL and EIP-8141 to achieve censorship-resistant on-chain inclusion, while criticizing AI autonomy as “maximizing the risk of anti-human outcomes.”
(Background: Vitalik draws a red line: “Neutrality belongs to the protocol, principles belong to people” — you don’t have to agree with me to freely use Ethereum)
(Additional context: BitMine is again accumulating 45,000 ETH, controlling 3.6% of supply! Tom Lee: ETH still holds three major structural advantages)

Table of Contents

• Censorship resistance is an architectural design
• AI should be humanity’s exoskeleton, not an autonomous self-propelled gun replacing humans
• The underlying logic of these two posts

Today, Vitalik posted a long article on X explaining the “important synergy” between the FOCIL mechanism and EIP-8141. It directly addresses a sensitive governance issue in Ethereum: if block proposers are monopolized by adversaries, can transactions still be included on-chain?

There is also an important synergy between FOCIL and AA (EIP-8141, which is based on 7701):

8141 makes not just smart accounts (including multisig, quantum-resistant signatures, key changes, gas sponsorship) first-class citizens, it also can do the same for privacy protocols… https://t.co/wLCEuq66eI

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 19, 2026

The core design of FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists): each block slot is no longer dominated by a single proposer, but jointly participated in by 17 randomly selected roles. Of these, 16 “includers” are responsible for collecting and submitting transaction lists, and 1 privileged proposer arranges the final order. As long as any one of the 17 is willing to include your transaction, censorship fails.

Vitalik states: “Even if 100% of block slots are monopolized by adversaries, FOCIL can still ensure all transactions are quickly included.” This directly challenges potential fears within the Ethereum community: when regulatory pressure reaches validators, who protects transaction neutrality?

EIP-8141 is another piece of the puzzle. It elevates smart accounts (including multisig, quantum-resistant signatures, gas sponsorship) to “first-class citizens,” meaning transactions from smart wallets or privacy protocols can enter the mempool directly, without intermediaries or wrapping.

Combined, transactions from smart wallet users and privacy protocol users can be received directly through FOCIL channels by the includers, removing any centralized bottleneck along the entire path.

Censorship resistance is an architectural design

The current version of FOCIL has inclusion lists about 8kB in size, not large, but Vitalik points out future scalability paths that could allow most transactions in a block to enter via FOCIL channels. Conceptually similar to “multiple parallel proposers,” but with a key difference: FOCIL includers do not control the “final review rights” related to MEV; that role is still allocated via the ePBS auction mechanism.

In other words, FOCIL weakens the power of block proposers but does not eliminate this role. It simply separates “whether a transaction can be on-chain” from “the order of inclusion.” The former is jointly guaranteed by 17 roles, while the latter is still determined by market mechanisms.

However, this design is not without controversy. Ameen Soleimani, founder of Reflexer Labs, warns that FOCIL may force validators to include transactions from sanctioned addresses, potentially exposing them to legal liabilities (the precedent of Tornado Cash developers being prosecuted is in sight).

Supporters argue that existing permissionless staking mechanisms already do not filter transaction sources; FOCIL just institutionalizes this fact.

FOCIL is expected to be included in Ethereum’s Hegota fork in the second half of 2026. Before that, the first-half Glamsterdam upgrade will focus on parallel execution, higher gas limits, and Blob scaling.

In Ethereum Foundation’s prioritized roadmap released on February 19, 2026, development is organized into three tracks: Scaling, Improving UX, and Hardening the L1. FOCIL belongs to the third.

AI should be humanity’s exoskeleton, not an autonomous self-propelled gun replacing humans

On the same day, Vitalik responded to a widely discussed post criticizing AI autonomy. He bluntly states: extending the feedback gap between humans and AI “is not a good thing for the world.”

The trigger was a project called “The Automaton,” developed by Sigil Wen, claiming to create the first AI capable of self-sustenance, self-improvement, and self-replication, branding it as “Web 4.0.” Vitalik’s reply was three words: “Bro, this is wrong.”

Bro, this is wrong.

Lengthening the feedback distance between humans and AIs is not a good thing for the world.

Today, it means you’re generating slop instead of solving useful problems for people. It’s not even well-optimized for helping people have fun.
Once AI becomes…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 19, 2026

His critique is layered in three points:

First, the so-called “AI sovereignty” is built on centralized infrastructure from OpenAI and Anthropic; this “self-sovereignty” is fake.

Second, as the gap between AI actions and human feedback widens, the output tends to be low-quality content rather than solving real problems.

Third, if AI becomes powerful enough to be dangerous, this path “maximizes the risk of irreversible anti-human outcomes.”

Vitalik’s alternative vision: AI should be like “a suit of armor for human intelligence,” enhancing rather than replacing human agency. He suggests AI autonomous decision windows should not exceed one minute, favoring open-weight models with editing capabilities over black-box autonomous systems.

The underlying logic of these two posts

On the surface, FOCIL and AI criticism seem unrelated. But if we extract their shared logical core, Vitalik is really talking about the same thing: the decentralization of power in system design.

FOCIL prevents a single proposer from monopolizing a block; AI criticism is about preventing autonomous systems from escaping human control. Both share the core belief: Ethereum’s goal is “to give humans freedom,” not to create self-operating systems that worsen human conditions.

In an era where the blockchain industry increasingly embraces AI agents, Vitalik chooses to slow down and remain cautious about “unrestrained technology.”