Anthropic Ban Triggers 30% Surge in Decentralized AI Tokens as Canada Warns of Centralization Risks

Canadian PM Urges AI Diversification After US Anthropic Block, Decentralized AI Tokens Rally

Decentralized AI removes the "kill switch," but still relies on a few chipmakers, observers told Decrypt. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned Sunday that U.S. restrictions on Anthropic's most advanced AI models expose the risk of leaning on a handful of American providers, after a government order pulled two frontier systems offline for users worldwide. "The situation we're in collectively right now with Mythos and Fable is something that can happen with overreliance on certain models," Carney said, speaking in Ireland ahead of the G7 summit in France, the Associated Press reported. Carney said nobody has "done anything wrong in the situation," but warned the mistake would be to "just accept this, don't take the lesson, don't build out and diversify." "It is never a good idea to have one option," the prime minister added. Carney's remarks follow a directive on Friday ordering Anthropic to cut access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for any foreign national inside or outside the United States on national security grounds. Anthropic promptly complied, disabling both systems for all customers. It disputed the basis, however, arguing the cited jailbreak is already replicable on public models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reportedly sent the letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, per Axios. It was reportedly driven in part by suspicion that a China-linked group had accessed Mythos, Semafor reported. The disputes come as Anthropic nears a $1 trillion valuation following annualized revenue of over $47 billion. Decrypt has reached out to Anthropic for comment and will update this article should they respond. Risks and costs The prime minister's concerns cast centralized AI as a single point of failure, where one company's compliance with a government order can cut off users everywhere at once. Centralized AI keeps a model and its controls inside one company. Decentralized AI spreads those functions across independent operators coordinated by a blockchain. Projects tied to decentralized AI rallied following the ban on Anthropic's models, with the sector's market cap at $24.3 billion, up 6% on the day and 12% over the week, per data from CoinGecko. Smaller compute and data networks led the way, with ChainOpera AI, io.net, Grass, and NOVA among those climbing more than 30% over the past week, while NEAR Protocol and Bittensor, two of the sector's largest tokens by market cap, rose 15.9% and 27.9% on the week respectively. The U.S. government's move on Anthropic points to "a risk that is largely unique to centralized AI," Dan Dadybayo, strategy lead at Horizontal Systems, told Decrypt. Backing Carney's warning, Dadybayo said reliance on a few U.S. providers "creates genuine systemic risk, similar to what we saw in finance in 2008." Distributing models across independent nodes removes the single "kill switch," but the risk persists if the compute behind them stays concentrated among a few suppliers, Dadybayo explained. Such a trend is being driven by "rising compute and data costs," Peter Anthony, founder and CEO of Perceptron Network, told Decrypt. Anthropic's situation "didn't create that problem, it just made it impossible to look away from," he added. While Anthony agreed with Carney's point that the order marked a "strategic vulnerability," he questioned whether decentralization solves it or "just pushes the chokepoint back one layer to GPU suppliers." If decentralized AI still runs on chips owned by a few cloud giants, "you've rebranded the risk, not removed it," he added.

Anthropic Ban Drives Demand for Decentralized AI Tokens

Grayscale says decentralized AI tokens gained after the US government ordered Anthropic to cut access to its latest AI models, showing user demand for alternatives to centralized AI. Anthropic's decision to shut down access to its latest artificial intelligence models after a US order to suspend access to foreign nationals highlights the risks of centralized control in AI, which could increase demand for decentralized alternatives, says Grayscale. Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl said in a note on Monday that the order to cut access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 shows "the centralized control of frontier AI technology and drives home the need for decentralized alternatives." "We expect demand for decentralized AI, like Bittensor and its TAO token, to continue to rise as investors seek alternatives," Pandl said. The US government on Friday directed Anthropic to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals over national security concerns. Anthropic subsequently disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users to comply with the order. Pandl noted that in the 12 hours after Anthropic cut access to its latest models, Bittensor's TAO token climbed 30% as users sought out a decentralized alternative, climbing to a three-week high of $283 on Monday. TAO has outperformed the wider crypto market over the past week. Source: CoinGecko Pandl explained that Bittensor offers an "alternative vision for AI based on decentralized principles," aiming to provide access to AI resources through an open, global, decentralized network. "Think of it as Bitcoin for AI." "Access to artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly important economic resource," Pandl added. "As AI capabilities continue to improve, governments and AI labs will play an increasingly important role in determining who can access these tools and under what conditions." Anthropic suspension sets a precedent Colton Malkerson, co-founder of EdgeRunner AI, argued that this event is a breaking point for corporate data independence. "We've been saying for a while that companies are 'renting' their intelligence from the big labs, but this is even worse," he said in a note to Cointelegraph. "It's like renting your intelligence, just like if you're renting a house and the landlord can cancel your lease whenever they want, kick you out, and look at all your property while you're a tenant." Tech entrepreneur and author Brett Hurt said in a note to Cointelegraph that the US order for Anthropic to cut off access to its models "was a precedent." "The moment a government can silence a commercial AI model overnight, with no public hearing, no technical disclosure, and no appeals process, every lab in America is now operating under an invisible ceiling."