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Trump’s Anthropic shutdown just made the case for non-American AI
Anthropic may bring Fable and Mythos back online, but the shutdown fired up sovereign AI efforts around the world.
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.