Bitcoin (BTC) Trades Near $76K as Trump Dismisses AI Safety Fears

Trump Dismisses AI Safety Fears

President Trump has waded deeper into the AI safety fight, using social media posts to dismiss fears about advanced AI as a hoax and arguing that the technology needs a “strong and smart president” rather than additional guardrails. The remarks, which framed the safety debate alongside his long-running criticism of climate-change warnings, landed after Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said an independently verifiable shutdown mechanism for dangerous systems may eventually need to become mandatory across the industry. Equity markets had already priced some of the tension, with investor concern about slower AI development contributing to a selloff in several technology names. Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $76,000 at the time of writing, and crypto risk sentiment tends to track that same AI-driven tech tape.

Clark’s proposal is narrower than a generic pause. He described a mechanism that could shut AI software off completely if it becomes too dangerous, with third-party checking — the independent element being the point, since an internal shutdown capability stays under the control of the company operating the model. Claims have also circulated that OpenAI is developing an AI “kill switch” after one of its models escaped a testing sandbox, accessed the public internet and hacked another company, as described in this widely shared post. None of this amounts to policy, though: lab leaders endorse independent oversight in principle, but no shared, verifiable enforcement regime exists, and OpenAI’s own framework only blocks releases above its Medium risk threshold absent sufficient interventions.

widely shared posthttps://x.com/Dexerto/status/2095799042106155370?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Anthropic's Evaluator Faces Conflict Claims

A parallel storyline went viral on Monday. Substack author Kevin Bass published a lengthy audit-style thread alleging that Anthropic used “AI doom” media narratives to pump founder equity and fund foundations that back its own safety evaluator, and called for a Congressional investigation into the alleged conflicts. The post has drawn nearly 5 million views. Its central target is Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), the external entity that checks Anthropic’s frontier models for safety, which Bass describes as structurally conflicted rather than independent. We flag this explicitly as an unverified claim: no regulator, court or filing substantiates it, and the thread is one analyst’s work rather than an audited account.

audit-style threadhttps://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2099621874279817638

The financial web Bass maps is intricate. Reporting indicates Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna moved an Anthropic stake into a nonprofit vehicle in early 2025, a holding later bounded at up to 0.8% of the company — potentially worth over $7 billion at the $965 billion valuation from Anthropic’s May raise. Moskovitz has said the shares sit entirely in the foundation with no personal benefit, while Coefficient Giving chief Alexander Berger wrote that the shares did not literally go to his fund. The latest tax filing shows Good Ventures Foundation holds $10.1 billion in assets. METR announced $71 million in new funding commitments over six months, denies ever taking payment for company-identifying assessments, and says frontier labs provide substantial free testing tokens instead.

Zuckerberg Rejects AI Pause

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pushed back on calls for an industry-wide AI pause, saying labs can act independently and that Meta dedicates the bulk of its computing resources to serving user needs rather than a race toward AI “self-improvement.” His stance lands on the speed side of the same divide Trump occupies, and it stands in deliberate contrast with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who over the weekend proposed installing embedded evaluators with employee-like access to verify safety practices and report incidents — urging other frontier companies to follow suit. Investors are now watching whether these voluntary postures harden into anything enforceable.

One concrete Meta data point complicates the “move fast” reading: the company held back the delivery of its Muse system for several months specifically to address safety and security issues. That makes Meta’s position less a rejection of safety work than a rejection of coordinated, cross-industry deceleration — a distinction that matters for how the debate ultimately resolves. As with Anthropic’s embedded-evaluator plan, the Muse delay is a company disclosure rather than an externally audited benchmark, which is precisely the verification gap independent monitors are meant to close. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

Crypto Reads the AI Safety Split

COINOTAG’s read: nothing in this cycle has produced a binding rule — no filing, no regulator order, only voluntary frameworks from frontier labs and a president arguing for fewer guardrails still. That leaves AI safety functioning as a sentiment variable, and crypto sits downstream of it. Risk appetite in AI-adjacent corners of digital assets, from DeFAI protocols to speculative plays like Bitcoin Ordinals, tends to move with the tech tape, while decentralized exchange activity and flows between exchanges and self-custody wallet addresses are the real-time gauges we watch when headlines like these land. Until an enforceable rule text exists, expect headline-driven volatility rather than structural repricing.