Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said he fired several engineers who failed to start using AI coding tools by a deadline he set — a disclosure he made this week on Stripe co-founder John Collison’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast.

Armstrong recounted that after Coinbase bought enterprise licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor, he was told it could take months just to get half the engineering team using them. Impatient, he says he “went rogue,” posting a message in the company’s engineering Slack telling everyone to onboard by the end of the week — or come to a Saturday meeting to explain why not. A few of those who showed up had no good reason, he said, and were let go. He concedes the approach was “heavy-handed,” but frames it as the way to make clear that adopting AI is not optional.

The remarks land in the middle of a broader corporate turn toward mandated AI use in engineering. Collison, on his own show, pushed on the practical question underneath it — how you actually run and maintain a codebase increasingly written by machines — a worry Armstrong said he shares.