At Washington’s request, Anthropic suddenly took its newest and most powerful AI models offline over the weekend. The American company said it had little choice after the White House demanded it block access for all foreign nationals, including its own employees. Abroad, the incident offered a sobering reminder that the US not only dominates frontier AI — its government also wields power over who gets to use it.
The Trump administration’s action was swift, sweeping, and imposed with little warning or explanation. The unprecedented shutdown of the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models — which were already subject to safeguards limiting their use in “high-risk areas” — that followed gave new force to long-running arguments cautioning against relying on the US for critical technologies. It was fresh ammunition for the politicians, governments, and companies already arguing that they need to lead in the technology themselves.
In the UK, AI and online safety minister Kanishka Narayan did not mention Anthropic, Donald Trump, or the US directly, but used the shutdown to argue that Britain must develop its own AI capacity, framing the issue as a matter of national security. “We treat every other threat to our sovereignty with deadly seriousness, but we haven’t learned to treat this one in the same way,” he said, as images of British police and military flashed on the screen. AI is “the central political question of our time,” Narayan said, arguing that Britain must decide how the technology will shape its economy, security, and sovereignty “before someone else decides the answer for us.”
In France, the reaction was more explicit — and more forceful in naming the US. Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, the presidential candidate for Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, called the shutdown the start of “the AI war” and said it shows France’s vulnerability if it relies on others for critical technologies. He likened the pullback of Anthropic’s models to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, with access to AI now a strategic chokepoint for which France must prepare. Attal is far from alone: Le Monde reported similar alarm from across France’s political spectrum.
The argument is not exactly new. Europe has spent years worried about its dependence on the US, technological or otherwise, and the European Union has put growing emphasis on reducing the region’s reliance on external providers in areas like chips, cloud computing, and AI. But the Anthropic shutdown has made things feel more immediate, adding to an already deep unease over America’s reliability as an ally under Trump, from trade disputes to threats of withdrawing from NATO. Attal said the issue will be at the heart of France’s next set of presidential elections, while members of the European Parliament have pointed to the withdrawal of Mythos and Fable as evidence Europe needs to make tech sovereignty a reality, and to do so quickly.
Canada has drawn a similar lesson to Europe. Prime Minister Mark Carney said the situation highlights the risk of relying on just one partner for access to crucial resources like AI. “The situation we’re in collectively right now with Mythos and Fable is something that can happen with overreliance on certain models,” he said. “Nobody has done anything wrong in the situation. But we will have done something wrong if we just accept this, don’t take the lesson, don’t build out and diversify.”
Others are well down that road already. Beijing has long championed domestic AI firms, and China is one of the few places with models capable of credibly rivaling the products of American frontier AI labs. However, in some areas, Chinese models do lag behind their American counterparts, and Anthropic has accused Chinese rivals of using its models to train its own on an “industrial” scale. Part of the White House’s decision to pull Mythos reportedly stems from its belief a group linked to China had accessed the model.
Most governments and businesses cannot come close to matching the scale and resources of frontier labs in the US or China. But sovereign AI does not always mean building the biggest or the most powerful tools. France’s Mistral and Canada’s Cohere show that solid efforts can come from outside these countries, even if the models can’t stand toe to toe. Other countries, like Singapore and the UAE, have focused on narrower but still strategic priorities such as infrastructure, or models that work better with local languages. Of course, there are also open-source models that could one day have Mythos-like capabilities that would be hard for any single party to control.
Trump may see restricting Mythos and Fable as a matter of national security. But the argument cuts both ways, and with Washington now asking if AI is too important for everyone to have access, other governments are asking whether they can afford for Washington to decide who does.
Anthropic may soon bring Mythos and Fable back online. Restoring global trust in American AI is another thing entirely. No matter how long the shutdown lasts, it shined a light on how fragile access to US frontier AI models is. Many governments and companies did not like what they saw — and are fired up to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
