Bitcoin Climbs to $78,000 as Crypto Sits Out the AI Selloff
Bitcoin rose 1.9% since midnight UTC on Monday, September 14, touching as high as $78,280, while Nasdaq 100 futures fell 1.65% and gold and silver both slid. The split is the story here: a call from a leading AI lab’s CEO to slow down AI development sent tech stocks sliding hard, and crypto, for once, didn’t come along for the ride.
What Triggered the Selloff
The catalyst traces back to comments from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who called for the AI industry to slow development to give safety measures time to catch up. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk, whose company xAI built Grok, reportedly voiced agreement. The market reaction was swift and concentrated: global AI-linked stocks sold off broadly, South Korea’s Kospi index dropped 3.26%, and memory-chip maker SK Hynix fell 6% given how central its chips are to AI infrastructure buildouts.
U.S. futures followed the same pattern ahead of the open. The Invesco QQQ ETF, which tracks the Nasdaq 100, fell roughly 1.5% in pre-market trading. Neocloud infrastructure providers Nebius and CoreWeave dropped 6% and 5% respectively, and chipmakers Sandisk and Intel each lost about 5%. Rising oil prices compounded the pressure on risk assets generally: Brent crude climbed to around $107 a barrel, adding a second headwind on top of the AI-driven equity selloff.
Adding a layer of irony to the moment, Anthropic reportedly selected Nasdaq for its anticipated IPO around the same time Altman confirmed OpenAI would not go public in 2026, meaning the same AI industry whose stocks were sliding on safety concerns is simultaneously moving toward deeper public-market integration.
Why Crypto Didn’t Follow
What makes Monday’s move genuinely notable is the divergence. Bitcoin was one of only two major asset classes trading in the green, alongside oil. Ninety-four of the 100 constituents in the CoinDesk 100 index were higher on the day, the broadest advance the index has shown in two weeks. Ether rose 2.1% to around $2,514, and XRP gained 3.3%.
There wasn’t a crypto-specific catalyst behind the move. Analysts covering the session described it plainly: crypto appeared largely immune to both the tech selloff and the broader AI safety anxiety weighing on equities, without any particular news of its own driving the gain. Some coverage pointed to renewed optimism around U.S. crypto regulation as a supporting factor for sentiment, with the Senate’s Clarity Act facing a cloture vote later in the week, though that alone doesn’t fully explain a move this broad-based across the asset class.
Positioning data suggests the rally is grinding higher rather than being driven by a leveraged squeeze. Aggregate open interest across crypto derivatives stood at $59.7 billion against $62.7 billion in 24-hour trading volume, with $127.8 million liquidated over the past day, according to Coinalyze, roughly half of Friday’s liquidation total. Bitcoin’s own open interest rose 2.07% to $24.8 billion, and ether’s climbed 2.97% to $14.8 billion, with funding rates positive and rising, consistent with a steady upward move rather than a short-covering spike.
The Bigger Picture: Still Below the August High
Even with Monday’s gain, bitcoin remains 4.8% below this month’s high of $82,284, and hasn’t managed to hold above $80,000 since a sharp rally in August. That August move was substantial: bitcoin’s first positive monthly close since 2021, with a roughly 25% gain that pulled the asset from the low $60,000s up toward $81,000, driven by strong ETF demand and a short squeeze. The rally has essentially stalled in the $75,000–$82,000 band since then.
ETF flow data helps explain the recent cooling. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs pulled in $730.8 million in net inflows on September 3, then flipped to outflows of $282.7 million on September 10, followed by a further $13.2 million outflow on September 11, according to Farside Investors data. Cumulative net inflows since launch still stand at roughly $55.2 billion, led by BlackRock’s IBIT, but the pace of the late-August rally clearly hasn’t been sustained into September.
What’s Next
The week ahead is dense with macro catalysts that could easily overshadow Monday’s crypto-specific outperformance. The Federal Reserve meets September 15–16, alongside separate rate decisions from the Bank of England and Bank of Japan. Traders are also still digesting recent inflation data and ongoing Treasury market activity, both of which have been cited as part of what’s kept bitcoin capped below $80,000 despite the underlying demand story remaining intact.
For now, Monday’s session offers a useful data point on how crypto is behaving relative to traditional risk assets in 2026: not immune to macro pressure generally, given oil and yields have both weighed on the market recently, but showing real signs of decoupling from a specifically tech-sector-driven selloff. Whether that decoupling holds through a busy central bank week, or whether crypto ultimately follows equities lower once the initial AI-safety headlines fade, is the more interesting question heading into the next few sessions.