Nunchuk’s New Bitcoin Tools Give AI Agents a Chore List, Not the Keys

Nunchuk just dropped open-source tools that let AI agents boss around Bitcoin wallets—without letting them swipe your keys, raid the treasury, or go full degen on your life savings. It’s like giving your intern access to the company Amex, but only for coffee runs.

The Bitcoin wallet startup, born in 2020 and still breathing (a rare feat in this space), just open-sourced two repos under the MIT license: Nunchuk CLI and Agent Skills for Nunchuk CLI. Together, they enable AI agents to do actual work—wallet setup, payments, fund management—while operating under "bounded authority." Translation: they can help, but they can’t yeet your stack to a privacy coin at 3 a.m.

"The problem with both existing approaches is the same: once the agent is set up, there's no meaningful check on what it can do with your money," Nunchuk founder and CEO Hugo Nguyen told Decrypt, probably while side-eyeing some sketchy AI wallet dApp that lets bots go full Uniswap sniper on user funds. "If it's compromised, misconfigured, or just makes a bad call, nothing stops it."

Enter multisig magic. Transactions need more than one key—because no, Skynet, you don’t get unilateral nuclear launch codes. AI agents can handle routine tasks, sure, but hit a spending limit? Cue the human. Someone has to soberly sign off, ideally after checking they’re not funding a meme coin called $MOONWALL.

"The agent can operate within bounded authority, but above the limit, the human still has to sign," Nguyen explained, which sounds suspiciously like parenting, but for bots.

And here’s the real flex: receiving and spending are on separate rails. Just because someone sends BTC to the wallet doesn’t mean the AI suddenly gets a raise in spending power. Funding ≠ authorization. It’s like depositing money into your kid’s bank account but not letting them buy a motorcycle.

Agent Skills acts as the translator—letting AI models interface with the CLI for wallet creation, inviting participants, tweaking policies, and executing transactions. Think of it as giving your AI a Bitcoin driver’s license, but only for city streets and daylight hours.

Nguyen said developers building financially-empowered AI systems need these guardrails. "They want to give their agents real financial capabilities, but handing them an unconstrained wallet isn't something they're comfortable with." Probably because the last time that happened, someone’s chatbot donated their net worth to a digital art of a pixel pug.