Anthropic shutdown fuels global sovereign AI push
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- Anthropic took its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models offline at the Trump administration's request, blocking access for all foreign nationals including its own employees, with the models already subject to safeguards limiting use in "high-risk areas"
- Kanishka Narayan, the UK's AI and online safety minister, used the shutdown to argue Britain must develop its own AI capacity, calling AI "the central political question of our time" and a sovereignty threat comparable to military and policing threats
- Gabriel Attal, former French PM and presidential candidate for Macron's Renaissance party, called the shutdown the start of "the AI war" and likened the US pullback of frontier models to Iran's Strait of Hormuz blockade, calling AI access a strategic chokepoint
- Mark Carney said the situation "highlights the risk of overreliance" on a single partner for AI, warning that "we will have done something wrong if we just accept this, don't take the lesson, don't build out and diversify"
- China has long championed domestic AI and produces models capable of rivaling US frontier labs, though Anthropic has accused Chinese rivals of training on its models at an "industrial" scale
- The White House decision to pull Mythos reportedly stems in part from its belief a group linked to China had accessed the model, and France's Mistral, Canada's Cohere, Singapore, the UAE, and open-source models are all cited as existing sovereign AI efforts
Why it matters: The shutdown converts sovereign AI from a long-running European policy debate into an urgent, public political demand across at least three allied capitals simultaneously, with France, the UK, and Canada now explicitly framing US AI dependence as a strategic vulnerability — potentially fragmenting the Western AI market the US currently dominates.
