Decentralized AI Tokens Rally as Carney Warns Over Anthropic Block

• NEAR
• TAO

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s warning over U.S. AI restrictions is giving decentralized AI tokens a fresh policy tailwind.

Carney said Sunday that Washington’s order forcing Anthropic to take its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models offline for foreign nationals showed the danger of leaning too heavily on a small group of American AI providers. Speaking in Ireland ahead of the G7 summit, he said the lesson was not to accept the disruption, but to build out and diversify.

Crypto traders treated the Anthropic block as a fresh signal that AI access is becoming a geopolitical risk. Tokens tied to decentralized AI networks moved higher, pushing the sector’s market capitalization to $24.3 billion, up 6% on the day and 12% over the past week.

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The rally was strongest in smaller compute and data-network tokens, including ChainOpera AI, io.net, Grass and NOVA, which each climbed more than 30% over the past week. Larger AI-linked assets also moved, with NEAR (CRYPTO: $NEAR) Protocol up 15.9% and Bittensor (CRYPTO: $TAO) gaining 27.9% over the same period.

The market reaction reflects a sharper version of a debate already running through AI and crypto. Centralized model providers can move faster, but they also leave users exposed when a government order, compliance decision or export-control fight cuts access across borders. Decentralized AI projects pitch a different structure: open networks of operators, compute providers, and token incentives designed to reduce dependence on a single company.

The harder question is whether decentralization removes the bottleneck or simply pushes it deeper into the stack. AI networks can reduce dependence on a single company, but the underlying compute still runs through scarce chips, data centers and cloud capacity. If GPU access remains concentrated, the pressure point may move rather than disappear.

For crypto markets, Carney’s comments turned a policy dispute into a tradable AI-infrastructure theme.

Bittensor (CRYPTO: TAO) is currently trading at $271.90 U.S. per digital token. NEAR Protocol (CRYPTO: NEAR) is currently trading at $2.49 U.S. per digital token.

Source: finance.yahoo.com