Bitcoin lovers are getting pulled into Mythos (Anthropic’s open-source cyber AI model), with the community obsessively talking about how AI might be the real Bitcoin killer.
But hear us out; the issue is not really about the Bitcoin network breaking, it is actually about everything around it.
Many people still push cold wallets over crypto exchanges, which instead hold the keys for you. And that tradeoff helped some of the first big crypto companies grow fast. So companies like Binance and Coinbase became the easy entry point. But oh, look! Here comes AI getting better at finding weak spots in software.
Crypto companies brace for faster attacks as Mythos targets weak software
The one part of the market that offers some comfort is the Bitcoin blockchain itself. It has operated without interruption since 2009, and it has never been hacked.
So when traders say Mythos is a threat, they are talking about the companies built around Bitcoin.
That includes exchanges, custodians, wallets, and other businesses that now sit alongside a much bigger crypto investment universe that also includes ETFs and crypto-linked stocks.
Coinbase chief security officer Philip Martin said, “Mythos, and future models like it, will enable even deeper testing of software and systems at scale.” He also said, “This will accelerate digital threats as well as digital defense.”
Philip added that Mythos is “a highly restricted model not available to the public,” and said Coinbase is in close communication with Anthropic. By press time, COIN stock was trading at $198, up more than 7%.
Not every company has the same access. Some large banks and tech companies, including Goldman Sachs, already got early access to Mythos, but crypto companies were not part of the first rollout. At Binance, chief security officer Jimmy Su said the exchange is relying on a mix of outside large language models, including earlier Anthropic systems, along with tools built inside the company to handle its security demands.
Anthropic faces outages amid Coinbase and Bitcoin exposure
The market reaction did not stop with the security talk. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around Anthropic stayed in the bullish zone, and message volume jumped into the extremely high range over the past day.
There was also a new analyst call on Wednesday for Coinbase. Piper Sandler raised its price target on Coinbase to $180 from $150 and kept a Neutral rating ahead of the company’s first-quarter earnings. The bank said it is somewhat cautious about difficult year-over-year comparisons for exchanges in the second quarter of 2026, though TheFly reported that a continuation of the Iran War could be a strong offset.
At the same time, Anthropic was dealing with technical issues across its own products. On Wednesday, the company said it saw elevated error rates affecting its Claude chatbot, its API, and Claude Code, based on its status page. It began investigating the issue at 10:53 a.m. ET. At about 12:30 p.m. ET, the company said login success rates for the chatbot had stabilized and that it was working to “fully resolve this issue.” By 1:50 p.m. ET, all systems were operational.
On Downdetector, around 6,000 users reported issues with Claude, but fell to roughly 2,000 about 2 hours later, then to about 500 moments after.
As you probably know, Anthropic was founded in 2021 by researchers and executives who left OpenAI, and Cryptopolitan reported yesterday that the company is now valued at $800 billion after new investment rounds post-Mythos.
Anthropic is also fighting for enterprise market share against rivals, including Google and OpenAI, which reached an $850 billion valuation in its latest funding round in late March.
