Trump's Anthropic Shutdown Galvanizes Sovereign AI Efforts in Europe and Beyond

When the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models offline for all foreign nationals — including the company's own non-American employees — it sent an unmistakable message to the rest of the world: access to frontier AI can be revoked by Washington at any time, with little warning or explanation. For governments already uneasy about US reliability under Trump, the incident crystallized a long-simmering anxiety into urgent political action.

In the UK, AI minister Kanishka Narayan framed self-reliant AI development as a matter of national security. In France, former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal called the shutdown the opening salvo of "the AI war," comparing it to Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned against over-dependence on a single partner for critical resources. Across Europe, the episode is being cited as fresh evidence that the EU must accelerate its push for technological sovereignty — and quickly — before the next disruption.