Anthropic blackout intensifies EU push for tech sovereignty

In mid‑June 2026 the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut foreign access to its two most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic removed access worldwide, preventing billions of users outside the United States from reaching those models.

Anthropic complied with the directive while disputing the government’s justification and pursuing legal and administrative options to restore service. In a statement the company said it was ‘removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users’ and that it ‘disagrees that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.’

UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan posted on X: ‘If national security is the question, sovereign AI capability is the central answer.’ European officials have cited the shutdown when discussing policies to secure access to key digital services.

The European Central Bank has pointed to the incident in its work on a digital euro to provide an alternative to existing card networks. The European Payments Initiative, which is developing an in‑store and online payment product called Wero, said that when it launched ‘only cloud services from international providers could deliver the performance, security and stability needed’ and that Wero still depends on services outside Europe in some areas.

EU governments and industry groups are accelerating plans to expand local cloud capacity, payment rails and AI development to reduce reliance on non‑European providers. The Commerce Department action showed that US authorities can limit foreign access to models hosted by US firms.

Anthropic warned that applying the same technical standard across the industry could stop new deployments of frontier models and argued any authority to block deployments should operate through a clear, transparent statutory process grounded in technical evidence.