‘This is the least crazy AI is ever going to be’: the lessons Europe’s execs must take from Anthropic’s shutdown

When the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to suspend foreign access to its two most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the episode came with little warning and caught the AI industry off guard. The order may have had less to do with foreign AI use than with Anthropic itself, an organization President Donald Trump has previously called an “out-of-control Radical Left AI company.” Anthropic, for its part, has framed the directive as a misunderstanding over a narrow technical vulnerability, rather than a political move. Whatever the real motive, foreign customers—including many of Europe’s Fortune 500—became collateral damage in a dispute between the administration and one of America’s leading AI developers. What unsettled European businesses wasn’t the specific dispute, but the realization that a foreign government can unilaterally cut off AI systems that companies have built into their daily operations, with no warning and no appeal. Washington has restricted the export of sensitive technology before, from public-key cryptography in the 1970s to nuclear technology. However this time, the technology being withheld sits inside the daily operations of hundreds of thousands of businesses. The EU relies on foreign countries for over 80% of its digital products and infrastructure, according to the European Commission and Parliament. Anthropic alone reportedly counts over 300,000 business customers, and says its Europe, Middle East and Africa revenue has grown more than ninefold in the past year. The episode exposed a vulnerability many executives have been “very reluctant” to acknowledge, says Marc Warner, CEO of U.K. AI company Faculty and chief technology officer of Accenture. “The idea that the U.S. could, in principle, simply cut off access to these systems is one that almost nobody took seriously until this weekend,” he says. The problem, Warner adds, is that there’s no ready alternative sitting in a