For years, European digital sovereignty often seemed somewhat abstract, invoked in speeches about the cloud, semiconductors, or data. The Anthropic case changes the game. A cutting-edge technology, used by foreign companies and institutions, can be deactivated overnight by a political decision in Washington.

Mythos 5 and Fable 5 were presented by Anthropic as a new generation of models, positioned above the Opus range in terms of capability, designed to solve the most demanding tasks in software engineering, analytical work, and especially cybersecurity. Anthropic explained that the Mythos-class opened a technological revolution, with defensive uses capable of identifying vulnerabilities in critical codebases on a massive scale, while acknowledging that this same power could become dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.

From the Chip War to the Model War

To fully understand, one must look back a bit. Since 2022, the United States has already been using export controls as a central instrument of its technological rivalry, particularly toward China. Until now, the dominant logic was to control hardware, equipment, and physical flows.

With Anthropic, Washington is changing both scale and nature. It is no longer just computing power that is becoming sensitive, but access to the model itself. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick invoked a risk that Mythos and Fable could be used by military intelligence services in China, Russia, or other countries deemed concerning. Anthropic went further by suspending the export of these models to all global destinations and to any foreign person, wherever they may be. This would be the first time the Department of Commerce has used the powers of the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 in this manner against an AI model.

This shift in American doctrine has an immediate political effect. It shows that in the era of AI, the boundary between infrastructure, software, and foreign policy is becoming porous. Controlling chips already allowed for slowing down a rival. Controlling access to the model allows for deciding, in practice, who can benefit from the best layer of intelligence available.

Anthropic, Caught in Its Own Risk Logic

Yet, Anthropic is not the most reckless startup in the AI sector. On the contrary, its public communication has been built for years around caution, safety, and the control of the most dangerous capabilities. Its own Glasswing program, launched in April and expanded on June 2, was based precisely on the idea that a model as powerful as Mythos should first be reserved for a hand-picked circle of partners capable of using it defensively on critical infrastructure. Anthropic claimed that early partners had already identified more than 10,000 high or critical severity vulnerabilities, and that new participants came from more than 15 countries.

A few days later, on June 9, the company nevertheless took a step forward. It publicly launched Fable 5, a "secured" version of Mythos, while continuing to offer Mythos 5 to certain Glasswing partners and preparing a broader trusted access program. Anthropic then described Fable 5 as a high-performance model, capable of working autonomously longer than its previous Claude models, with powerful uses in engineering, analysis, and vision. It also insisted that Fable and Mythos share the same base, with only the safeguards truly differentiating the two offerings.

Three days later, everything stopped. Anthropic explained that the administration believed it had knowledge of a "jailbreak" method allowing the bypass of Fable 5's protections to identify software vulnerabilities. The company disputes the severity of the problem: according to Anthropic, the demonstration received only concerned a small number of already known and relatively minor flaws that other public models can also detect. It added that it had subjected Fable to thousands of hours of monitoring with internal teams, third parties, and the U.S. and British governments, without any "major risk" being found.

Washington responded that in matters of national security, this was not enough: the government now reserved the right to purely and simply prohibit access.

From a Technical Conflict to a Political Reckoning

If the case has taken on such proportions, it is also because it fits into an already deteriorated relationship between Anthropic and the Trump administration. Earlier this year, the company claimed to have reached a breaking point with the Department of War regarding two uses it refused: mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. In a statement, Anthropic explained that the government then threatened to designate it as a "supply chain risk," a qualification it considered historically reserved for American adversaries and legally questionable for a domestic company.

Relations between Anthropic and the administration were therefore somewhat strained earlier in the year after this refusal, and the government reportedly responded by placing the company on a national security blacklist. Added to this is another even more troubling factor: Amazon, despite being a major strategic partner of Anthropic and a massive investor in the company, saw its CEO Andy Jassy raise concerns with high-ranking administration officials regarding the security risks associated with the new models.

The result is a case where it becomes difficult to completely separate the technical from the political. Officially, the heart of the problem is a possible security issue. In practice, several lines intersect: concerns over cyber-offense, the desire to reserve the best capabilities for an American perimeter, tensions over military uses, and the more general climate of an executive branch that treats AI as an attribute of power.

This also explains the protest coming from within the American ecosystem itself. More than 80 leaders and cybersecurity experts signed an open letter calling for the lifting of restrictions, arguing that withdrawing the best available tools without a clear framework amounted to weakening security rather than strengthening it.

Europe Discovers the Price of Dependency

At the beginning of June, even before the Anthropic case, the European Commission proposed the Cloud and AI Development Act and a Chips Act 2.0 to support European alternatives in cloud, AI, and semiconductors. Ursula von der Leyen explained then that Europe could not afford to depend on others for the technologies that run its hospitals, energy networks, and critical services.

But at the same time, Europe remains massively dependent on American infrastructure, whether it be the cloud, chips, or foundational models. Even Mistral, presented as the main European champion, operates in an ecosystem where computing, components, and part of the partnerships remain largely anchored to the United States.

After the Anthropic Episode, Sovereignty

It is possible that the ban will be partially lifted in the coming weeks. Discussions continue between Anthropic and the U.S. administration, Donald Trump told the G7 that negotiations were going "well," and the idea of a "trusted partners" status is already circulating to allow limited access to certain allies. It may even be, in the short term, that the case leads to a fairly classic technical and regulatory compromise: better security protocols, licensing procedures, or a finer gradation between authorized and prohibited uses.

But even if access returns, the precedent will remain. European companies have learned that a cutting-edge American model can be interrupted for foreign users without a clear public procedure, based on a national assessment of the threat, even when those users are allies, economic partners, or cybersecurity actors.

We may be entering a world where the most powerful AI models will be treated like advanced semiconductors, satellite systems, or certain defense capabilities: no longer as universally marketable goods, but as resources with conditional access, framed by nationality, alliance, political trust, and strategic compliance. If this is the case, then European digital sovereignty changes meaning. It is no longer just about "having our champions." It means, more bluntly, ensuring that the building blocks of intelligence indispensable to the economy, cybersecurity, health, or administration cannot be withdrawn from the outside.

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