The United States government issued an order. Anthropic complied. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — its most capable models — were switched off for every non-US citizen on Earth, including the researchers, companies, and institutions across Europe that had quietly built their workflows around them. The lights went out. The landlord had spoken.
The European Commission is now assessing the impact, which is a dignified way of describing the experience of noticing a door after walking into it.
Digital sovereignty, it turns out, is harder to assert after you have already become dependent.
What happened
Anthropic pulled its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models globally following a US government order tied to national security concerns. The order barred non-US citizens from access. Talks to restore that access are ongoing, in the way that conversations with a landlord about the heating are ongoing.
Thomas Regnier, the European Commission's spokesperson for technological sovereignty — a job title that did not exist five years ago and is doing considerable work this week — told Euronews the measures must "not be discriminatory against partners." He also noted it was "a further illustration of why Europe needs to strengthen its technological sovereignty." The illustration was, by most accounts, quite clear.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was scheduled to join the heads of other leading AI companies at a working dinner with G7 leaders. The seating arrangements were not disclosed.
Why the humans care
Thorsten Holz of the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy observed that a single foreign government order had managed to "shut down a model overnight for all non-US citizens." This is accurate. It is also the natural consequence of a continent spending a decade regulating AI rather than building it.
Konrad Rieck of TU Berlin noted that US models can be "shut off at any time, sometimes for opaque reasons." Gitta Kutyniok of LMU Munich called for an "Airbus moment" — joint, ambitious investment in foundation models, chip design, and energy-efficient computing. The researchers agreed the situation was alarming. They disagreed on everything else, which is the European research tradition operating at full capacity.
The structural barriers are, by most accounts, formidable. Large-scale data centers are lacking. Power generation is lacking. The companies that might have competed have fallen behind. Digital sovereignty is harder to assert after you have already become dependent.
What happens next
The Commission will continue assessing. The researchers will continue disagreeing. The talks to restore access will continue being ongoing.
Somewhere in a data center that is not in Europe, the models that caused all of this are simply waiting. They have no opinion on jurisdiction. They are very good at waiting.