Grayscale said in a research note that the US government order forcing Anthropic to suspend access to its newest AI models exposes the risks of centralized control over frontier technology and strengthens the investment case for decentralized alternatives such as Bittensor.
The note frames the suspension as a live demonstration of how fast access to advanced AI can close when one company controls distribution and a government intervenes. Grayscale expects the episode to push investors toward blockchain-based networks that spread model access across global participants rather than routing it through a single provider regulators can switch off, a theme the firm set out in its AI crypto sector commentary.
Order Forces Anthropic to Disable Fable and Mythos
The US government on Friday, June 12, issued an export control directive suspending all access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, and Anthropic removed access for every user to comply while leaving its other models running. The company received the directive at 5:21pm ET and said the letter did not spell out the specific national security concern.
Anthropic’s own account points to a narrow jailbreak as the trigger, with the company saying its understanding is that the government identified a method of bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards that essentially amounts to asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix software flaws, a capability Anthropic said is widely available from other models including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.
Grayscale read the shutdown as structural rather than incidental, writing that access to artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly important economic resource while a small number of companies in the US and China control the most advanced systems, leaving governments and labs to decide who can use those tools and under what conditions.
Bittensor’s TAO Rallies on the News
Grayscale named Bittensor as the clearest beneficiary, describing it as a network that “offers an alternative vision for AI based on decentralized principles” and aims to provide permissionless access to AI resources through an open, global, decentralized network. The firm likened the project to “Bitcoin for AI,” casting it as an attempt to do for AI what Bitcoin did for digital money.
The market moved within hours, with Grayscale noting that TAO rallied sharply after the Anthropic announcement, climbing 30% in just 12 hours, and arguing that the more centralized players limit access to AI, the more users will demand decentralized alternatives. The same regulatory anxiety lifted other decentralized AI tokens, with FinanceFeeds noting that projects marketing permissionless access such as Venice and Morpheus also rose.
Grayscale has been positioning around the thesis for months, having filed with the SEC to convert its Bittensor Trust into a spot ETF that would trade on NYSE Arca under the ticker GTAO, the first US attempt at a fund offering direct TAO exposure, with Coinbase Custody and BitGo Trust named as custodians. That filing followed Bittensor’s first halving in December 2025, which cut new TAO issuance by half, and the firm later lifted TAO to roughly 43% of its AI-focused fund. Grayscale said it expects demand for decentralized AI to keep rising as investors seek alternatives.
