Is Anthropic Quietly Building What Bitcoin Always Promised?

Is Anthropic Quietly Building What Bitcoin Always Promised? A Developer's Deep Dive "Anthropic isn't trying to kill Bitcoin. That would require them to care about it. They're too busy building something that accidentally does the same job better." — Mohit Aggarwal, Medium (March 2026) A viral piece by Jose Crespo, PhD, titled "Anthropic is Killing Bitcoin" has been circulating since February 2026 — collecting thousands of reactions, rebuttals, and LinkedIn reposts. The thesis is bold: Anthropic has accidentally built an AI-native currency through its token-based API pricing, one that outperforms Bitcoin by six orders of magnitude in the tasks that actually matter for a machine economy. Is this hype? Is it right? Is it somewhere in the middle? As developers, we're uniquely positioned to cut through the noise. Let's go data-first. The Argument, Distilled The Crespo article makes three core claims: Capital is already deserting Bitcoin infrastructure in favor of AI compute contracts — and