Bitcoin and ether decoupled from a broad selloff in artificial-intelligence-linked technology stocks on Monday, as renewed warnings from AI industry leaders about the pace of development rattled equity markets while crypto held its ground.
Bitcoin gained about 1% over 24 hours to roughly $77,800, while ether added around 1% to near $2,500, according to CoinDesk. The moves came even as U.S. technology and AI stocks fell sharply in pre-market trading, with the Invesco QQQ ETF, which tracks the Nasdaq 100, down 1.5%.
What triggered the selloff
The pressure on tech shares traces back to comments over the weekend from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who called for the AI industry to slow its pace of development so safety measures can catch up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, whose xAI developed Grok, both voiced agreement with Amodei's concerns. Separately, Anthropic reportedly selected Nasdaq for its anticipated IPO, while Altman confirmed OpenAI will not go public in 2026.
The reaction was global: South Korea's Kospi fell 3% and SK Hynix, a major memory-chip supplier to AI companies, dropped 6%. In the U.S., "neocloud" AI infrastructure providers were hit hardest -- Nebius fell about 6% and CoreWeave dropped roughly 5% in pre-market trading, while chipmakers Sandisk and Intel each lost around 5%.
Oil and gold add to the cross-asset picture
Rising energy prices compounded the risk-off tone in equities: Brent crude climbed more than 3% to above $107 a barrel, while WTI traded above $103. Longer-dated Treasury yields eased slightly, with the 10-year just below 5% and the 30-year at 5.355%. Precious metals moved against the classic safe-haven script, with gold falling almost 1% to around $4,300 an ounce and silver down 1.5%, suggesting Monday's flows were driven more by an AI-specific tech unwind than a broad flight to traditional safety.
Market Impact: Bullish for Bitcoin near-term, bearish for AI-linked tech
The verdict here is mixed by asset class rather than uniformly risk-on or risk-off. For Bitcoin and ether, Monday's price action is modestly bullish: both assets gained while AI/tech equities sold off, reinforcing a narrative (however early) that crypto can trade independently of Nasdaq-style tech sentiment when the selloff is idiosyncratic to one sector (AI capex/safety concerns) rather than a broad macro shock like a hawkish Fed surprise. If that decoupling holds through the week, it could support the case that BTC is behaving more like a distinct macro asset than a high-beta Nasdaq proxy.
For the Nasdaq and AI-exposed names specifically, the news is bearish in the near term: renewed high-profile warnings about AI development pace -- from the very CEOs building the technology -- inject fresh uncertainty into the AI capex story that has driven much of this year's tech rally, and neocloud/chip names with the most direct AI infrastructure exposure (Nebius, CoreWeave, SK Hynix, Sandisk, Intel) are bearing the brunt of the repricing. Gold and silver's own declines suggest this isn't (yet) a broad flight-to-safety event, so traders should watch whether AI safety rhetoric escalates into concrete policy or spending pullbacks before reading too much macro signal into a single session.