Tokens tied to two decentralized AI projects rose after the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to cut foreign-national access to its newest models late Friday, with backers casting the shutdown as proof of their censorship-resistant pitch.

Venice's VVV token climbed about 14% over 24 hours to $16.37 by Saturday afternoon, with a 24-hour high of $17.66, as trading volume jumped nearly 200% to roughly $130 million, according to CoinGecko data. Morpheus's MOR rose about 21% to $2.28 over the same period, but on just under $300,000 of volume.

The trigger appeared to be a federal order against a centralized rival. Frontier AI lab Anthropic said it received an export-control directive at 5:21 p.m. ET Friday to suspend access to its recently launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for any foreign national, inside or outside the U.S. To comply, it disabled both models for all customers, while leaving its other models running. A U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that the Commerce Department issued the directive.

Anthropic launched Fable 5 on June 9 as the first publicly available model in its "Mythos-class" tier, shipping it with built-in safeguards because the underlying system is capable enough to find and exploit software flaws. The company said the government's concern centers on a method of bypassing those guardrails, called it a narrow issue that other models share, and described the order as a misunderstanding it is working to reverse.

Anthropic's Mythos model has been shown to be remarkably effective at cybersecurity-related tasks, at a time when AI is emerging as an accelerator of the blockchain security arms race. AI lowers the barrier to entry for attackers, helping more people read codebases faster and automate parts of vulnerability discovery, Immunefi CEO Mitchell Amador recently told The Block. 

The decentralized AI camp treated the shutdown as a gift. The official Morpheus account posted that decentralized AI "never looked better," thanked Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei for the "free publicity," and offered "condolences" to users knocked out of their workflow, blaming "government overreach."

Voorhees tied the order to Venice's core pitch. Responding to a post arguing the directive's overlooked consequence may be that AI platforms will have to verify users' citizenship, the ShapeShift founder and former chief executive wrote, "There's a reason we built Venice."

Dean Ball, a former White House official who worked on the administration's 2025 AI Action Plan, wrote on X that the order implies non-Americans are barred from Anthropic's top models even inside the U.S., and that users should expect to have to prove citizenship to access them. The scope is broad enough that it could affect foreign-national employees of Anthropic; Reuters noted that several key Anthropic personnel, such as Amanda Askell, the primary author of Claude's constitution, were born outside the U.S., though their citizenship status was unclear.

Venice, founded by Voorhees, is a privacy-focused, uncensored AI platform that runs open-source AI models that test as less powerful than Mythos/Fable. Users stake its VVV token for access, while the Morpheus decentralized AI network rewards contributors of compute, code and capital with MOR. Morpheus describes itself as a community project with no founder.

Anthropic said it would share more details within 24 hours and is trying to restore access, leaving open how durable Friday's "permissionless" rally turns out to be.