The price of TAO, the native token of decentralized AI network Bittensor, jumped over 13% on June 13, 2026, following a sudden U.S. government order restricting foreign access to Anthropic’s newest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
The U.S. Department of Commerce issued an export control directive late on June 12, citing national security concerns, forcing Anthropic to immediately suspend the two models for all non-U.S. nationals—including those working inside the company and customers worldwide. CEO Dario Amodei had only days earlier acknowledged in an essay that AI progress was outpacing policy, having launched the models on June 9.
The move revived intense debate around centralized AI risks. Trump administration officials argued the restriction was necessary, but critics labeled it “cartoonish” and “incoherent”. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen slammed regulators who had “never built a single thing,” while Dean W. Ball of the Foundation for American Innovation questioned why the administration was greenlighting advanced chip sales to China while blocking allied access to American AI software. Others drew parallels to the 1990s encryption wars, predicting the controls would eventually collapse.
Internationally, the ban triggered fears over AI sovereignty. Reform UK spokesperson Zia Yusuf said Britain had “virtually zero sovereign AI” capability, and Indian entrepreneur Vasant Shetty warned that India—the second-largest market for Anthropic products—was now entirely at the mercy of a foreign government’s regulatory whims.
Within the crypto community, the episode was seen as a powerful validation of decentralized AI. Bittensor’s TAO token rallied as advocates highlighted that no single authority could shut down a permissionless AI network. The project’s account stressed that “decentralized AI vision is advocated not only because it looks better, but also because control of AI should not be concentrated in a single hand.”
The directive marked a shift from previous U.S. export controls, which had focused on hardware. Earlier in the year, a California judge ruled that the Trump administration had violated free speech protections when pressuring Anthropic over military AI use. This latest action, targeting software models directly, is seen as a potential catalyst for accelerated adoption of open-source and locally hosted AI solutions.
