What the Anthropic shutdown means for Europe

**Freya Pratty** (0:02)
Hello, this is the newsroom edition of The Sifted Podcast, and I'm your host, Freya Pratty. Late last week, the European tech ecosystem got a glimpse of a future many had worried about. US AI giant Anthropic announced it had been ordered by the US government to suspend access to its most advanced AI models for foreign nationals.
The restrictions may prove temporary, but they've caused a big reaction in Europe. It's being described as a wake-up call. Today, we're discussing what happened, why it matters, and what Europe should do next. Joining me to do so is senior reporter Daphné Leprince-Ringuet.

**Daphné Leprince-Ringuet** (0:37)
Hello.

**Freya Pratty** (0:38)
Daphné, where are you joining us from today?

**Daphné Leprince-Ringuet** (0:40)
I'm joining us ever from Paris.

**Freya Pratty** (0:42)
Great. I am in London where I am based. Let's start them with what actually happened. Talk us through the events of the end of last week.

**Daphné Leprince-Ringuet** (0:49)
What actually happened? Anthropic, which is one of the leading US AI labs, the maker of the chatbot Claude, which a lot of us use every day, was ordered by the US government via what's called an export control directive to cut off access to two of its most powerful models to all non-US citizens.
So the models this applied to were Mythos and Fable 5, which are some of Anthropic's highest performing models. They're basically the same model. The only difference is that Fable is more consumer oriented and has more safeguards. For now, Anthropic has cut off access to all of its customers out of safety to be sure that it can implement the directive. It's unclear when and if Europeans will ever get access back to these models. What's interesting is that the directive was issued for national security concerns. The details of what these concerns are exactly were not disclosed. But Anthropic said the decision was likely prompted by fears of jailbreaking.
So jailbreaking happens when users can get around the safeguards of a model, get past those safeguards to carry out malevolent actions, things like accessing private data or prompting the model to give answers to questions that it shouldn't be allowed to give answers to. So essentially, the model is deemed not safe enough by the US government who prompted this export control directive as a result. This is important because it's the first example of the so-called digital kill switch, which has been worrying Europeans for a long time. It's this idea that Europe is very reliant on the US for some critical technologies, AI being one of them, but not only. We've also got cloud services that Europe is very dependent on the US for, and other technologies. There's been a lot of worry in recent years that access to these key technologies could be restricted or even turned off by the Trump administration in the context of these escalating tariff wars and so on. Europeans have been preparing for this possibility. They've been aware of their dependencies and their over-reliance on US tech, but it's never happened until now. This is the first instance of this digital kill switch happening in real time and actually tangibly restricting access for Europeans to some critical technologies.

**Freya Pratty** (3:16)
I thought it was interesting that the news came a day after a group of quite high-profile researchers, including visionaries, VC Judith Dardot, published a paper called Europe 2031, which called on European governments to bolster the continent's AI industry in the face of these geopolitical dynamics. It instantly validated their paper. This happened just after they published, which was quite good timing for them probably.

**Daphné Leprince-Ringuet** (3:38)
Yes. Also interestingly, it came just over a week after the EU Commission published its tech sovereignty package, which the very existence of the tech sovereignty package is linked to that possibility of a digital kill switch. The tech sovereignty package basically attempts to reduce Europe's reliance on the US and well, on foreign players by that, meaning the US and to an extent China, for some key technologies by, for example, increasing Europe's capabilities in cloud and AI infrastructure and also encouraging European organizations to first of all, assess their dependencies and second of all, for critical services, actively make the choice to reduce the proeminence of foreign technology providers.
Again, very timely events to have come just a few days or over a week after that.

**Freya Pratty** (4:33)
Exactly. You've been speaking to both founders and investors about the situation. From talking to them, how existential do you think this is for their companies?

**Daphné Leprince-Ringuet** (4:42)
So founders and investors obviously are talking about it a lot. I think what I thought was very interesting with this was the political reaction as well. I don't know how it was in the UK, but in France, it came from all sides of the political spectrum. The former Prime Minister, Gabrielle Adel, talked about AI being a technological war, that France and Europe must absolutely wage for their sovereignty. The president of the far right, Rassemblement National, who is not normally super active on technological topics, or at least a bit further removed from those topics than other parties, also spoke about the event. So I thought it was interesting that it kind of, across the political spectrum, attracted reactions and quite strong-wided reactions. Obviously, AI being a technological war is not a small thing to say. So that was interesting. In terms of founders and investors and businesses, I was told it was the only thing that anyone could talk about all weekend. I was told by one founder that we're entering a new phase.