The U.S. decision last month to ban international access to Anthropic’s latest model exposed a growing gap between the pace of the technology and policy’s ability to keep up with it. Then, later in June, that G-7 leaders devoted a significant slice of their summit to it shows they see the stakes. But it also revealed the absence of an actionable agenda.

On this issue as on others, geopolitics curtails what is possible. The imperative to stay ahead constrains what countries can do domestically and what they can do together. But such steps as the Anthropic ban, which in its bluntness as an export control made no distinction between America’s allies and others, risks an inadvertent consequence: a technological fragmentation that weakens the West’s collective scale, which is critical to its strategic advantage.

The U.S. decision last month to ban international access to Anthropic’s latest model exposed a growing gap between the pace of the technology and policy’s ability to keep up with it. Then, later in June, that G-7 leaders devoted a significant slice of their summit to it shows they see the stakes. But it also revealed the absence of an actionable agenda.

On this issue as on others, geopolitics curtails what is possible. The imperative to stay ahead constrains what countries can do domestically and what they can do together. But such steps as the Anthropic ban, which in its bluntness as an export control made no distinction between America’s allies and others, risks an inadvertent consequence: a technological fragmentation that weakens the West’s collective scale, which is critical to its strategic advantage.

A sovereign stack in Europe fully separate from the United States is neither achievable nor desirable for either Europe or the United States. Frontier capability at American scale is beyond Europe’s reach on any relevant timeline, and European capital is better deployed within the stack in the important areas of application and orchestration, where it can secure agency and amplify its strategic advantage. The United States, meanwhile, should have no strategic interest in pushing its allies toward such self-sufficiency. But the ban, which undermines allied certainty of consistent access to U.S. technology, risks exactly that. Building the international architecture to prevent this outcome is not just urgent but strategically essential.

What is needed is a pre-agreed playbook and pre-prepared toolkit that can be deployed deliberately without collateral........

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