Bitcoin Slides Under $67K as AI Risk-Off Ripples Through Crypto

Bitcoin’s latest leg lower isn’t just a crypto story—it looks like a cross-asset sentiment break. The benchmark cryptocurrency slipped beneath $67,000 on Monday, a level not seen since before Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory roughly 15 months ago. Per CoinGecko, Bitcoin is off 23% over the past week to $66,753, while Ethereum and Solana have fared worse, down nearly 33% to $1,936 and 30% to $84, respectively.

The move coincides with a wobble in U.S. equities. The Nasdaq retreated 1.6% and the S&P 500 fell 1.2%, according to Yahoo Finance, as investors trimmed exposure across higher-beta names. The S&P 500 software and services cohort slid 3% on Thursday, hinting at a targeted de-risking in AI-adjacent plays.

Here’s the dynamic worth focusing on: sentiment contagion from AI to crypto. Carlos Guzman, a research analyst at GSR, noted that crypto appears to be falling in sympathy with other risk assets as portfolios pare back AI-linked risk. He pointed to recently released legal tools for Anthropic’s Cowork product, which have amplified fears of disruption. His read on Bitcoin: fundamentals look largely intact, yet sentiment has weakened sharply—among the softest he’s observed.

That framing tracks with how this market behaves in stress. Crypto often serves as the high-beta expression of macro narratives, and when a dominant theme—right now, AI—comes under scrutiny, traders tend to prune risk in layers. The first cut hits thematic equities; the next hits liquid proxies for growth and speculation, which includes BTC and especially ETH and SOL. In that sequence, fundamentals take a back seat to positioning and psychology.

From a market structure standpoint, these drawdowns rarely require new negative information inside crypto. The driver is the repricing of uncertainty. Portfolio managers who bought crypto as part of a broader “innovation” basket often sell the whole sleeve when volatility in one component spikes. That rotation compresses liquidity, widens spreads, and pressures prices further—irrespective of on-chain data or protocol roadmaps.

There’s also a narrative inversion at play. For months, crypto benefitted from the idea that AI and blockchains would converge—shared compute, provenance, agent payments. When AI’s trajectory feels messy, the spillover turns that shared story from tailwind to headwind. New legal toolkits, like those referenced around Anthropic’s Cowork, can stoke unease about who captures value and how quickly incumbents can reshape moats. That uncertainty bleeds into token valuations, even if it doesn’t change Bitcoin’s issuance schedule or security model.

Ethically and practically, it helps to resist post hoc certainty. Markets often over-attribute causality to a single headline. What matters for traders is acknowledging that sentiment shocks can be rational without being fundamental. As long as risk budgets are tightening across tech, crypto’s correlation to growth and AI exposure is likely to stay elevated. When that correlation loosens—e.g., if AI equities stabilize while BTC bases—that’s usually the first sign the sentiment reset has run its course.

For now, the tape says the election-era cushion is gone and crypto is trading with the broader risk complex. Until positioning cleans up and the AI narrative steadies, Bitcoin’s path will be dictated more by risk appetite than by any change in its core mechanics.