The United States government recently ordered AI company Anthropic to suspend foreign nationals’ access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, two of its most advanced AI models, citing national security concerns. Anthropic responded by disabling the models for all customers.

Organizations in Canada, Europe and around the world that had embedded those tools in their workflows found them simply gone. No appeal process. No migration window. No warning. No jurisdiction over this decision.

As the G7 summit wraps up in Evian, France, the Anthropic shutdown has put AI sovereignty and concerns about U.S. dominance high on the agenda.

For Canada, the Anthropic shutdown is not just a technology story. It is the bill arriving for past choices — years spent celebrating AI research leadership while under-investing in the commercial, capital and governance conditions to turn leadership into lasting sovereignty.

Canada’s new AI for All strategy recognizes that dependence on foreign technology is a strategic vulnerability. It commits billions to compute infrastructure, skills development and domestic AI capacity. These investments are necessary and welcome. But you can build your own data centres and still depend on someone else’s models.

Canada needs to build the commercial conditions, long-term investment, procurement pathways and scale-up support that would allow AI companies to grow here rather than leave.

Canada’s AI research leadership

Canada’s contribution to modern AI is a matter of historical record.

Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, helped make Montréal one of the world’s........

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