Why Tether Is Expanding Into the AI Market Now

• Tether is moving beyond cryptocurrency infrastructure to create an open environment for decentralized AI.
• The company strengthens its position through sustainable profits, diversification, and technology investments.
• Despite challenges in the EU, USDT maintains its global leadership, and Tether continues to grow strongly.

On May 5, 2025, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino announced the upcoming launch of a platform called Tether AI. According to him, it will allow the USDT stablecoin issuer to become ”the technological foundation to achieve the vision of AI described in Asimov's science fiction books.”

At first glance, such a move may seem like a departure from the company's usual activities. In fact, it fits logically into its strategy of technological expansion: decentralized computing, privacy, autonomy, and support for digital assets.

The Coinpaper team explored the new project from Tether, the company's status quo, and its ambition to get ”a piece of the artificial intelligence-flavored pie.”

Ambition with the prefix ”AI”

As announced by USDT issuer representatives, the Tether AI project is designed as an open, modular ”AI runtime environment.” It can be used to run and develop models without being tied to cloud platforms and centralized APIs. According to the developers, the solution will be able to run on any hardware — from mobile devices to embedded systems.

The main goal of Tether AI lies in creating a modular peer-to-peer network of AI agents capable of communicating, making decisions, and performing various transactions, including cryptocurrency transactions. To accomplish this, the ecosystem will integrate the Wallet Development Kit (WDK), a toolkit that allows for the creation of non-custodial wallets that support USDT and bitcoin. With the technology, agents will be able to conduct payment transactions directly, without third parties.

Although the company has not yet released detailed information regarding Tether AI, it is known that the firm is working on a number of artificial intelligence-based applications.

We are talking about the following solutions:

• AI Translate — a chatbot for translating texts;
• AI Voice Assistant — a voice assistant;
• Bitcoin Wallet Assistant — an assistant for managing bitcoin wallets, including checking balances and sending funds.

In addition, the company is developing an open-source SDK based on Bare (JavaScript runtime environment from Holepunch developers). The kit will support local data processing and self-custody.

These projects are overseen by an internal Tether Data division created as part of the restructuring of 2024. It is responsible for research, development of P2P networks, and AI products. The BrainOS initiative, a solution to improve user cognitive productivity, was also presented in the same direction.

In general, if you look closely at the rhetoric of the head of the firm, it becomes clear that the company's movement towards artificial intelligence is not just a matter of technology and finance. The expressions that Ardoino uses are more suitable for a certain ”ideology of the new generation.”

The head of Tether explicitly calls the announced project a counterweight to centralized services managed by the so-called Big Tech. He cited as inspiration the works of Isaac Asimov and the idea of a ”fabric AI infrastructure” in which artificial intelligence is embedded in everyday devices.

To put it simply, Tether aims to make running AI as simple and private as installing an app. In addition, the user should retain full control over the solution — without hidden algorithms, data collection, or the need to connect to remote servers.

Moreover, the potential use of cryptoassets in microtransactions between AI agents opens up the prospect of creating a machine economy. We are talking about an environment where autonomous solutions will be able to exchange services, buy computing power, or mediate financial flows.

This, according to the company, lays the foundation for the emergence of new forms of cooperation between humans and AI. With transparent, cryptographically secure architecture and minimal dependence on intermediaries.

An Issuer with Unmatched Confidence

To understand the context of Tether AI's launch, it's worth looking at the company's current financials. According to the report for Q1 2025, the USDT issuer's assets exceeded $149.3 billion, of which over $120 billion is placed in U.S. Treasuries. Net income for the period amounted to $1 billion.

However, this is only ”part of the iceberg,” because for the last two years Tether has been consistently forming a hybrid structure, including elements of fintech, computing, AI, and digital assets. The company is becoming less and less dependent solely on USDT, strengthening its presence in related sectors.

Besides the sphere of stablecoins and the AI technology market, it is also engaged in other areas through its own projects or partnerships:

• Fizen is a crypto-financial startup promoting payment via QR codes and terminals with instant conversion to fiat. The solution targets countries with limited access to banks;
• OCEAN — a decentralized bitcoin mining project with a focus on independence from centralized pools and increased transparency in asset mining;
• XAUT — a fully gold-backed stablecoin that serves as a hedging tool in times of high inflation or market volatility;...
• Be Water — a media initiative to expand Tether's presence in digital content, including video platforms and streaming;
• 21 Capital — a $3 billion cryptocurrency project launched with participation from Cantor Fitzgerald, Tether, SoftBank, and Bitfinex. The company plans to invest heavily in bitcoin in an effort to replicate Strategy.

This is just a fraction of the projects in which the stablecoin giant is involved. Investments in such developments underscore Tether's likely desire for technological autonomy and diversification. With regulation becoming increasingly fragmented across countries, the company is tailoring products to specific markets;

The media often write that Tether is actively building up capital in the form of liquid assets. This, in their opinion, allows the company not only to support USDT turnover, but also to finance the development of new areas without attracting external investors. In this vein, the launch of Tether AI looks not like an experiment, but a well-considered move with an eye on the market, which is formed at the intersection of crypto-assets and the AI sector.

A Note of Caution

If we look at Tether's situation globally, we cannot help but mention that it faced serious regulatory constraints in Europe. In 2024, the MiCA regulation came into effect in the region, obliging stablecoin issuers to obtain a special license, keep reserves in EU banks, and comply with strict transparency standards.

Tether has openly refused to comply with these demands. This led to the consistent delisting of USDT on major exchanges — Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, Crypto.com. Ardoino, for his part, criticized MiCA as a tool to pressure and promote the digital euro.

However, here it is important to take into account that significant USDT trading volumes today come from Asian, U.S., and Latin American markets. Thus, the ”European episode” is an important but not critical factor for the asset's global leadership, as noted by Ardoino himself.

Appetites are growing

Tether is far from being the only crypto-industry company to pay attention to the AI sector. On the contrary, the industry as a whole is entering a phase of active integration of the two areas—blockchain and machine learning.

Here are just a few examples:

Core Scientific—one of the largest miners in the U.S.—adapts infrastructure for AI tasks.Filecoin Foundation develops decentralized storage solutions for generative models.Chainlink, a decentralized blockchain oracle network.Bittensor builds a network of neural networks with an internal reward economy for learning contributions.

At the heart of these initiatives is the desire to create an AI infrastructure based on decentralization, transparency, and self-governance. The idea of Tether AI fits logically into this impulse, as the company's solution is at the point of intersection between cryptoassets and AI-based services.