Anthropic shutdown sparks sovereignty debate across Europe

The European Commission is assessing the implications of the US order that forced Anthropic to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5 worldwide. European researchers are debating the right response: building their own foundation models or securing access through contracts.

The European Commission says it’s currently assessing the practical impact of the US export control order that forced Anthropic to shut down its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models worldwide. Thomas Regnier, the Commission’s spokesperson for technological sovereignty, told Euronews that emergency measures must “not be discriminatory against partners.” He called it a “shared challenge, not one confined to a single jurisdiction or company.” The development is “a ​further ⁠illustration of why Europe needs to strengthen its technological sovereignty,” he added, according to Reuters.Ad Days earlier, Anthropic had pulled its most advanced models worldwide following a US government order tied to national security concerns. Talks to restore access are ongoing. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will join the heads of other leading AI companies at a working dinner with G7 leaders on Wednesday.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 In a collection of statements published by the Science Media Center, several European researchers also describe the situation as a wake-up call. They disagree sharply, however, on what Europe should do about it. Thorsten Holz of the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy called it striking that a single foreign government order could “shut down a model overnight for all non-US citizens,” including European companies. Digital sovereignty, he argued, doesn’t mean self-sufficiency. It means being able to use critical technology even during geopolitical conflicts.Ad Konrad Rieck of TU Berlin put it more bluntly. US models can be “shut off at any time, sometimes for opaque reasons,” he said, and Europe needs to develop and operate its own capable models. In the same vein, Gitta Kutyniok of LMU Munich called for an “Airbus moment” for AI, with joint, ambitious investment in foundation models, chip design, and energy-efficient computing. Anyone who waits until the structures are already in place, she warned, will have almost no room left to shape them. Paul Röttger of the Oxford Internet Institute took a very different stance. He said he doesn’t believe more investment in European AI is the answer: “Europe won’t be able to develop models like Mythos or Fable 5 in competition with the US.” Instead, Röttger argued, access should be secured through contracts, tied to data center investments and backed by credible trade policy threats.AdDEC_D_Incontent-2 Two more researchers highlighted just how hard building homegrown capacity would actually be. Matthias Hein of the University of Tübingen warned that Europe needs not just one but several providers of its own, because nobody should count on commercial companies to keep releasing open-weight models. Jonas Geiping of the ELLIS Institute Tübingen pointed to the structural barriers behind that goal.