(June 16): With the recent crackdown on Anthropic, the Trump administration has given global leaders another reason to panic about their place in the technology race.
On Friday, the US ordered Anthropic PBC to deny foreign nationals access to the company’s newest artificial intelligence (AI) models. The export ban asserted a broad, unprecedented authority over the technology.
Until then, conversations in Europe about losing access to US tech — sometimes posed as a presidential “kill switch” — were theoretical. To many on the continent, Friday’s move underscored the dire need to find alternatives to American AI, and fast.
France’s Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu announced on Tuesday that the civil service would roll out a tool based on local startup Mistral AI. He added that French company Chapsvision had been selected by the French domestic intelligence agency DGSI to replace US software firm Palantir.
“France must have its own tools,” Lecornu said. “We cannot rely on the goodwill of certain partners who, as we have seen in recent days, are capable of cutting off access to the Anthropic model.”
Palantir said in a statement Tuesday it renewed a long-term contract with DGSI in late 2025 for a period of several years and the deal remains fully in effect.
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US allies — already reeling from the Iran war and Donald Trump’s wavering commitment to Nato — must now confront a future in which the White House can pull the plug on AI sales abroad as it pleases. The US government has previously used similar export control measures to control access to AI chips.
The leaders of the Group of Seven countries included AI as one of the key points of discussion at the meeting being hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in Evian, France, which runs through Wednesday. A draft statement seen by Bloomberg said the group would “further discuss emerging opportunities and potential risks arising from AI, notably in the financial sector”.
The latest ban, which hits Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models, affects software that banks, law firms and government offices are rushing to adopt. That decision “materialises a risk that had been on everyone’s mind” outside of the US, said Mathilde Velliet, who focuses on the US tech strategy as a research fellow at the French Institute for Foreign Relations.
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Europe, the Middle East and Canada have struggled to create their own AI companies that are of a similar scale to the US-based frontier models, meaning local companies and governments often choose dominant American products that make them more vulnerable to the Trump administration’s whims.
The US export ban “shows how the US government views Europe: as an enemy, not as a friend and ally”, Alexandra Geese, a European parliamentarian from Germany, said in a statement. French presidential candidate for the centrist Renaissance party, Gabriel Attal, declared over the weekend that the “AI war has already begun”. His rival on the far left, Jean-Luc Melenchon said his party “refuses to let France become a digital colony of the US”. Officials in London, Ottawa and Brussels also voiced concerns.
Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, said the Anthropic ban shows how over-reliance on certain AI models leaves countries vulnerable. Carney earlier this year advocated for a coalition of “middle powers”, where the UK, Canada and European nations join with Korea and Japan to share computing resources and use their firms in the tech supply chain as bargaining chips.
A similar dynamic could play out with future technologies where the US and China have distinct leads, like nuclear fusion and commercial quantum computing, said Dex Hunter-Torricke, president of the London-based Center for Tomorrow, a nonprofit focused on AI. “We are going to be at the whims and the interests of Washington and Beijing,” said the former Google DeepMind executive. “Every leader has to admit we need something different if we want to preserve our autonomy in the future.”
Velliet, the researcher in France, said that Mistral stands to gain from Anthropic’s restrictions in the long run, as Europe’s only large developer of AI models. The Parisian startup, with a sales pitch that emphasises business continuity, is in talks with investors about nearly doubling its valuation to €20 billion (US$23.2 billion or $29.74 billion), Bloomberg reported on Friday, before Trump’s Anthropic move. Mistral declined to comment on the ban.
Cohere, a smaller Anthropic competitor, has seen a “huge” amount of inbound interest since the export ban, Joelle Pineau, Cohere’s chief AI officer told Bloomberg TV this week. The Canadian startup recently bought Aleph Alpha, a struggling German AI firm, in a deal pitched as a diplomatic alliance with Germany.
Silicon Valley’s largest AI developers have argued that they are principally interested in providing tools for Western democracies and their allies. In an interview last week, before Trump’s decision, OpenAI policy chief Chris Lehane said his company strives to make its services “accessible, abundant and available” in those markets.
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OpenAI declined to comment on Trump’s export controls on its main rival.
Florian Douetteau, the French chief executive of AI startup Dataiku, described the Anthropic ban as a “fantastic moment” for Europe — a potential catalyst where the continent could invest in its own models. “It is no longer possible for an enterprise that is reasonable to only rely on one model that is based in another country,” he said.
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