Bitcoin miners shift to AI infrastructure as open‑source AI sparks $2.9 bn crypto boom

Ben Lilly argues that open‑source artificial‑intelligence is entering a regulatory battle similar to Bitcoin’s early fight, citing a U.S. export ban on Anthropic’s latest model and OpenAI’s restriction of GPT‑5.6. He highlights emerging decentralized AI projects such as Dark Bloom, c0mpute and Pluralis that aim to train large models on distributed consumer compute.

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei contends that open‑source models complement closed‑lab research. After U.S. restrictions hit Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5, $2.87 billion rushed into AI‑focused crypto tokens, with Bittensor, Venice and Morpheus posting strong gains. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, open‑sourced in November 2024, is now used by over 10,000 servers and platforms like Microsoft and GitHub.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin miners are being repurposed as AI‑infrastructure providers. Owning massive, grid‑connected facilities, they control more than 27 GW of planned power capacity and are signing long‑term contracts with AI firms, shifting their valuation away from Bitcoin price movements toward reliable electricity‑as‑a‑service revenue.