The US President Donald Trump delivered a nearly two-hour State of the Union address on Tuesday — the longest in US history — touting economic gains, warning Iran against pursuing nuclear weapons, and defending his tariff agenda after a Supreme Court setback.

Yet in a speech that touched on taxes, AI, housing, and healthcare, digital assets were entirely absent.

All the Trumps Were There, but Not Crypto

The omission is striking. All of Trump’s children were in attendance, including sons Donald Jr. and Eric, who have been deeply involved in crypto ventures such as World Liberty Financial and various token launches.

The president himself has repeatedly pledged to make the US “the crypto capital of the planet.” None of that made it into the address.

Tariff Chaos and Sticky Inflation Keep the Fed on Hold

For crypto markets, the most consequential signals were macro, not legislative.

Trump called the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down his emergency tariffs “very unfortunate” and vowed to maintain them under alternative legal authorities, insisting “congressional action will not be necessary.”

But the rollout quickly turned chaotic. Trump first announced a 10% replacement rate, then revised it to 15% days later. Yet official documents show the lower rate took effect Tuesday with no directive to raise it. The EU suspended ratification of its summer trade deal on Monday; India deferred scheduled talks.

Trump repeated his claim that tariffs could “substantially replace” income taxes. Economists call this implausible. The federal government collected $2.4 trillion in income taxes in 2024 but took in only about $300 billion from tariffs — and must now refund roughly half of that under the court ruling. Also, US importers pay the tariffs, not foreign governments.

On inflation, Trump claimed core inflation fell to 1.7% in late 2025. The reality is more complicated. The Fed’s preferred gauge — core PCE — accelerated to 3% in December, well above the 2% target.

With inflation sticky and tariff policy unresolved, the Fed is widely expected to hold rates steady for the foreseeable future. The three-quarter-point cuts delivered late last year appear to be the last for some time. For risk assets, including crypto, the higher-rate environment persists.

AI Gets Attention, Crypto Does Not

While crypto went unmentioned, AI earned a dedicated segment. Trump announced a “ratepayer protection pledge” requiring tech companies to build their own power plants for data centers, acknowledging the grid “could never handle” surging demand.

First Lady Melania Trump‘s AI legislation work was also highlighted — a sign that AI policy occupies a far more prominent place in the administration’s agenda than digital asset regulation.

The Bottom Line

Trump’s record-length address was a midterm election pitch built on economic optimism. But for crypto participants, the takeaways are clear: no legislative momentum for digital assets despite the president’s family being neck-deep in the industry, unresolved tariff turmoil injecting macro uncertainty, and a Fed locked in place by sticky inflation. The conditions weighing on risk assets aren’t likely to change anytime soon.

Bitcoin is exhibiting textbook bottom formation characteristics across multiple indicators, trading at levels that historically precede significant recoveries, according to onchain analyst James Check. Time — not price — is, however, likely to be the bigger test for bitcoin bulls.

“Every mean reversion model, from technical to onchain, is trading within bottom formation levels, typically seen after the price capitulation event (which December 2018 and June 2022 were examples of),” wrote Check on Tuesday morning as bitcoin plunged through $63,000, seemingly on its way to testing the Feb. 5 panic low of $60,000.

“Either Bitcoin is dead, will no longer mean revert, and all your models are broken,” Check continued. “Or you should be ignoring the bears … and quietly [be] dollar cost averaging [and] stacking sats from here on.”

Check — who correctly urged caution in 2025 about investing in any of BTC treasury companies formed to try and replicate the success of Michael Saylor’s Strategy — acknowledged today that it’s possible or even likely that the price of bitcoin could fall even further from here. Time, though, will be the more important factor. He reminded of the brutal 2022 bear market. Folks remember the price low around $15,600 in December of that year, but bitcoin essentially bottomed six months earlier at about $17,600. The rest was just waiting, and then a final liquidity flush (surrounding the FTX collapse).

“This is literally what a de-risked setup looks like for bitcoin,” concluded Check. “If you’re not actively accumulating bitcoin at this stage, then when?”

Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic has accused three AI firms of illicitly using its large language model Claude to improve their own models in a technique known as a “distillation” attack.

In a blog post on Sunday, Anthropic said that it had identified these “attacks” by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax, which involve training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.

Anthropic accused the trio of generating “over 16 million exchanges” combined with the firm’s Claude AI across “approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts.” 

“Distillation is a widely used and legitimate training method. For example, frontier AI labs routinely distill their own models to create smaller, cheaper versions for their customers,” Anthropic wrote, adding: 

“But distillation can also be used for illicit purposes: competitors can use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.”

Anthropic said that the attacks focused on scraping Claude for a wide range of purposes, including agentic reasoning, coding and data analysis, rubric-based grading tasks, and computer vision. 

“Each campaign targeted Claude’s most differentiated capabilities: agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding,” the multi-billion-dollar AI firm said. 

Anthropic says it was able to identify the trio via an “IP address correlation, request metadata, infrastructure indicators, and in some cases corroboration from industry partners who observed the same actors and behaviors on their platforms.”

DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Minimax are all AI companies based in China. All three have estimated valuations in the multi-billion dollar range, with DeepSeek being the most widely internationally recognized out of the three. 

Beyond the intellectual property implications, Anthropic argued that distillation campaigns from foreign competitors present genuine geopolitical risks. 

“Foreign labs that distill American models can then feed these unprotected capabilities into military, intelligence, and surveillance systems—enabling authoritarian governments to deploy frontier AI for offensive cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and mass surveillance,” the firm said.