Coinbase CEO: Fine-tuned Qwen3.5-9B model delivers better fraud prevention performance at lower cost and faster speed

PANews reported on October 12 that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that after the company internally fine-tuned the open-weight model Qwen3.5-9B using proprietary data, it outperformed frontier large models on the specialized task of fraud prevention, while also being cheaper and faster. Armstrong said this pattern will become more common within enterprises in the future: frontier models excel at general tasks, while specialized models targeting niche domains will perform better. Coinbase is streamlining the process for internal employees to fine-tune models, even offering internal skill instructions to help quickly start training, and expects some backend services to be fully replaceable by such architectures.