Anthropic, export controls, and the wrong panic
On Friday, the US government blocked access to Anthropic's most advanced AI model, Mythos, for non-American users.
The internet immediately went into meltdown about kill switches and government overreach. I could hear the LinkedIn tears from way over here.
The reasons are dubious. An Amazon–Trump conversation on AI security triggered the intervention: from an administration already at odds with Anthropic over AI weapons policy, against a company that had spent months declaring Mythos too dangerous to release. At best, a naive reaction; at worst, retribution.
Now I'm seeing posts along the lines of: "This could happen with your phone. This could happen with your laptop. This could happen with your credit card."
Yes and no. I get the instinct, but this is not that. And conflating them makes the real argument for digital sovereignty weaker.
What happened here is an export control. A specific legal mechanism for restricting the flow of sensitive technology across borders: chips, military hardware, and now AI models. The Commerce Department needs a specific justification to invoke it. Anthropic gave them one.
There was also an added wrinkle: because Anthropic couldn't reliably identify users by nationality, the block ended up applying globally. The mechanism may have been targeted, but the effect ended up looking like a service suspension.
But this export control isn't a remote off switch for your Microsoft 365 account. Suspending cloud services to European businesses requires different legal authority, different political justification, and carries consequences of a different order entirely. The line isn't uncrossable, ask the ICC judges, but it's a different line.
The problem with crying wolf isn't that wolves don't exist, it's that when you point at the wrong one, people stop listening. Export controls on AI and your structural dependency on US cloud infrastructure are both real risks. Bundling them together undermines both. They need separate arguments – made separately.
The concern you should be paying attention to is structural. European organisations are running critical operations on infrastructure they don't control, under laws they have no influence over. Those companies can change their terms, get acquired, face sanctions, or simply decide your market isn't worth serving anymore.
No government vendetta required.
Colin