The shutdown of Anthropic’s Mythos model sparks a global scramble for sovereign AI

On Friday, when the U.S. government pulled the plug on global access to Anthropic’s most powerful AI models, it confirmed some of Europe’s worst fears. For the first time, Washington had effectively used what some had dubbed a “kill switch”—the ability to cut off foreign access to U.S. AI systems.

Politicians around the world responded with panic and anxiety about their own countries’ dependence on U.S. AI technology. In Europe especially, it reignited calls for what officials describe as “sovereign AI”—the idea that countries should control the AI models, computing infrastructure, and data that underpin the increasingly critical technology, rather than depending on systems that can be restricted or withdrawn by foreign governments.

Europe has, for some time, been heavily reliant on the U.S. for its technological infrastructure. The EU relies on non-EU countries for more than 80% of its technology and 70% of its cloud computing, according to the European Commission and the European Parliament. The U.S. and China together control roughly 90% of global AI computing infrastructure, according to AI research firm Epoch AI, leaving Europe with limited capacity to train or run AI models independently.

Over the past few years, and particularly since U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term in office, countries have increasingly seen American behavior as erratic and threatening to the established global order, with everything from unexpected tariffs to demands that Denmark surrender Greenland to the U.S. In light of this, that dependency on U.S. technology has started to feel like a strategic vulnerability. Some governments had begun taking concrete steps to reduce their reliance on the US: the European Parliament replaced Google with Qwant, a French privacy-focused search engine, citing concerns over personal data collection, while Germany, France, and the Netherlands have moved Microsoft off public-sector infrastructure.

But the Anthropic shutdown makes the stakes, when it comes to the AI race, harder to ignore. Aside from France’s Mistral, whose models currently lag their American counterparts, Europe does not have a frontier AI company, and the continent’s data center build-out has also been plagued by high energy costs, capital constraints, and regulation.

In the UK, Member of Parliament Al Carns said British hospitals, companies, and researchers had been suddenly stripped of access to Fable 5. Tom Tugendhat, a former UK security minister, said that the incident demonstrated that national security is now more about “code........

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