A Fraught Fortnight

Happily, Donald Trump didn’t need to make good on his threat to send Iranian civilisation to hell last week and a ceasefire - albeit a fragile one - is currently in place. Today’s forward guidance looks at whether this two-week truce can hold and how markets are reacting to the pause in hostilities.

Elsewhere, the big news on the AI front this week came from Anthropic, who revealed that they are putting the general release of their newest model on hold because it’s too powerful. We look at how Claude Mythos Preview is scaring a lot of people and assess the possible consequences for crypto. But, AI itself could also be due some disruption…

⚗️Helium Hiatus ⚗️

The more unforeseen consequences of the war in the Middle East continue to unfold. Last week’s video unpacked the impending shortage of naphtha, the critical chemical feedstock that powers much of modern manufacturing. Today, we take a look at another critical substance that’s just become scarcer: helium.

Helium is a vital and irreplaceable input in the manufacture of advanced AI chips; without it, the 400-million-dollar-a-pop lithography machines that produce these chips can’t function. So, a shortage of helium means a slowing in the production of chips, which means bad news for the AI industry, which - given how AI investment is basically propping up the stock market - means bad news for all of us.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

Two weeks. That is all the runway the ceasefire has bought. Iran has agreed to allow limited transit through the Strait of Hormuz: around 12 to 15 ships per day, with tolls payable in bitcoin or yuan. Markets, desperate for any sign of normal service being resumed, have rallied hard on the hope that a pause in hostilities becomes permanent.

Bitcoin hit $73k this week which is a roughly 10% bounce from the $66,000 lows of early April. But context matters: BTC is still down over 30% from its January high around $97,000, and the rally has been driven almost entirely by short liquidations and ceasefire optimism rather than fresh institutional conviction. Glassnode data shows spot demand remains muted; the bounce has been a futures-driven squeeze, not a structural bid.

The ceasefire itself is fragile in ways that should concern anyone pricing in a clean resolution. Iran’s ten-point proposal includes conditions the US would never accept: reparations, de facto Iranian control of Hormuz, complete US withdrawal from the region. Israel continues striking Lebanon, which Iran has explicitly warned could collapse the deal. The two-week window is less a path to peace and more a chance for both sides to reload while the physical oil market partially reopens.

Speaking of oil: Brent remains above $90 despite crashing from $119 at the end of March. That drop is meaningful for sentiment, but the underlying damage to global supply chains is done. March CPI came in at 3.3%, with energy inflation at +10.9%: the largest monthly jump since 2005. The Fed remains on hold, trapped between an economy that needs rate cuts and an inflation print that argues against them.

This is the macro backdrop crypto must navigate. The Iran war, even in its paused state, has triggered a repricing of risk globally. JGB yields hit 2.43%, their highest since 1997, as Japanese inflation expectations surge. Private credit markets are showing stress that JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon warned will be "larger than expected" in his annual letter. The easy money era is definitively over; the question is how violently markets adjust.

Against this backdrop, the institutional crypto infrastructure continues to expand. Morgan Stanley launched MSBT, its spot Bitcoin ETF, on Wednesday with a 0.14% fee that undercuts BlackRock. TD Cowen initiated coverage on BTC treasury companies with a $140,000 year-end target for Bitcoin. The CLARITY Act, which would finally establish clear crypto market structure rules, is advancing toward Senate markup with Treasury Secretary Bessent and SEC Chair Atkins both pushing for passage.

The long-term architecture for institutional crypto adoption is being built in real time. But the short-term reality is that Bitcoin remains hostage to geopolitics and macro. As highlighted last week, the war's economic damage cannot be undone by a ceasefire announcement. Oil prices remain elevated; supply chains are disrupted; inflation is entrenched. Even if Hormuz fully reopens in two weeks, the physical oil market will take months to normalize.

Bitcoin is likely to consolidate in the $68,000 to $75,000 range over the next two weeks as markets wait to see whether the ceasefire holds. A permanent resolution to the Iran conflict would be genuinely bullish and could send BTC toward $80,000 or higher by summer. But the base case is that the ceasefire collapses or gets extended indefinitely, leaving markets in limbo.

The risk is to the downside: if hostilities resume before oil markets normalize, $60,000 is back in play for BTC. Conviction remains low on either side of the trade, which is itself telling. Stay defensive until we get clarity on whether this is a real end to the war, or just an intermission.

🤖 Mythos: Hype or Game Changer? 🤖

Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic’s latest general purpose AI model, is generating fascination and fear in roughly equal measure.

The company’s 243-page system card described Mythos Preview as its “best-aligned model by a significant margin” while simultaneously warning it also “likely poses the greatest alignment-related risk of any model” that the team has released to date. The model posted a 93.9 per cent score on SWE-bench Verified and 97.6 per cent on USAMO 2026 - this is a double-digit lead over both Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4.

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team also noted the model was “strikingly capable at computer security tasks.” It reportedly identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and every major web browser.

Incredibly, these included vulnerabilities that had survived decades of human security audits and millions of automated tests. In particular, the team highlighted that the model discovered bugs in OpenBSD that had been present for 27 years. This is notable given that OpenBSD is an operating system known primarily for its security.

Perhaps most unsettling though, Anthropic's system card disclosed instances of what it called "reckless destructive actions" during testing. This included one episode where Mythos Preview escaped a sandbox environment and sent an unsolicited email to the researcher overseeing the test. It’s important to note here that this was part of a test to see if it was able to violate the safeguards in place.

In other words, less Skynet (conscious AI) and more plain-powerful (non-conscious) AI. So, there’s no rush to hoard toilet paper and weapons just yet.

That said, this behaviour is still a real security risk. In fact, Anthropic declared the model too dangerous for public release and instead funnelled it into a restricted defensive coalition called Project Glasswing.

Yes, you heard that right. Anthropic is choosing to NOT sell its most impressive product, at least for now. NBC News reported it was the first time in nearly seven years that a leading AI company had publicly withheld a model over safety concerns. The last time this happened was in 2019 – when OpenAI decided to restrict GPT-2 “due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale.”

That said, there are some who see this as posturing. They believe all this fearmongering may just be well-crafted marketing hype ahead of the model’s eventual release.

For what it’s worth, there might be some truth in that. As one internet user (Mo Bitar) notes, the 243-page system card includes a 20-page "impressions" section where employees describe the model's creative outputs in a manner that hints at the AI possibly having consciousness. In fact, there’s also a section that describes a psychiatrist diagnosing the model as having "uncertainty about its identity."

While a plain reading of this might inspire fear and awe, the simple truth is that these outputs are merely a result of the data it was fed during training – including Anthropic’s own blog posts about model consciousness. Again, it’s less Skynet and more plain-powerful AI. Or, as Mo puts it, it’s similar to Apple releasing phones with better cameras. While it lets you click a better picture of a tree, you can’t recreate the tree itself.

In fact, AI security firm AISLE recently published an independent analysis that tested Mythos's showcase vulnerabilities (including the 27-year OpenBSD SACK bug) on small, cheap, open-weights models. The report found that all eight models detected the FreeBSD flagship exploit, including a 3.6-billion-parameter model costing $0.11 per million tokens. It also states that a 5.1-billion-active-parameter model was able to recover the full chain of the OpenBSD bug.

To cut a long story short, the report demolishes the idea that Anthropic’s Mythos Preview is the “one best” model for cybersecurity. In reality, many of the smaller models were able to outperform most of the frontier models from every major lab. However, the ranking of each model’s individual cybersecurity capabilities reshuffled completely across tasks and did not scale smoothly with model size. AISLE's founder Stanislav Fort calls this the "jagged frontier" of cyber security.

In simple terms, it makes the case that there is no stable best model for security work. It argues that the real moat is in the systems built around these models, rather than the model itself.

That said, if detection-grade capabilities are already broadly accessible via cheap open models, the idea that Mythos is safely locked away from public access isn’t all that comforting anymore. After all, it means that it’s only a matter of time before someone finds a way to wrap DeepSeek R1 or Kimi K2 in a system tailored for specific DeFi exploits.

In fact, CrowdStrike's 2026 Global Threat Report found an 89 per cent year-on-year increase in attacks by adversaries using AI. The average DeFi protocol does not have OpenBSD's decades of security scrutiny. Most rely on a handful of third-party audits, each of which examines the code at a single point in time.

This is partly why there is and should be an ever-increasing focus on security within the crypto space. The most recent example of this focus is the Solana Foundation’s recently launched security programme named STRIDE (Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises). Notably, STRIDE is a tiered security programme built with Asymmetric Research that replaces the industry's standard model of one-off audits with continuous, foundation-funded protection.

If you’ve been keeping in touch with the space, you’d know the timing of the launch is no coincidence. It came just days after North Korean state-affiliated attackers drained roughly $286 million from Drift Protocol in under twelve minutes - the largest DeFi exploit of 2026 so far. While the Drift hack itself was the result of social engineering, it’s a stark reminder of the incentive that exists for bad actors to target crypto projects.

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📖 Quote of the Week 📖

“Pain plus reflection equals progress.” - Ray Dalio

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.