Trump rejects UK plea for exemption from Anthropic AI ban

The White House rejected Britain’s request for a carve-out from the Anthropic export ban, with a source close to Trump telling The Telegraph there was “zero chance.”thenextweb
France announced its intelligence agency DGSI will replace Palantir tools with French firm ChapsVision and give all civil servants a Mistral AI-powered assistant.reuters
The U.S. Commerce Department’s June 12 directive forced Anthropic to disable its newest models entirely, igniting calls across Europe for sovereign AI infrastructure.techpolicy

Anthropic Export Ban Sparks Global Calls for Sovereign AI

When the U.S. Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to suspend all foreign access to its newly released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models on June 12, citing national security concerns, it set off a chain reaction that is now reshaping how allied nations think about their dependence on American technology. Unable to quickly screen users by nationality, Anthropic disabled both models entirely — cutting off Americans and foreigners alike.fortune

Allied Nations Sound the Alarm

Politicians across Europe and beyond responded with calls to treat frontier AI as critical infrastructure that must not depend on foreign providers. In the U.K., AI minister Kanishka Narayan said the move had direct implications for defense, noting that “the most capable models used in drones, counter-drone defense systems, and cybersecurity — those are now the fundamental fault line for who wins and who loses in warfare.” Former U.K. security minister Tom Tugendhat said national security is now more about “code than cannons.” Britain lobbied the White House for an exemption and was told there was “zero chance” of a carve-out, according to a source close to President Trump cited by The Telegraph.fortune

In France, former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said the incident proved AI is now as essential as electricity or the internet — and “infrastructure controlled by others is infrastructure that others can unplug.” In Finland, MEP Aura Salla said Europe “cannot keep building its tech stack on access that can be switched off overnight by a foreign government,” while German MEP Sergey Lagodinsky pushed for a consortium of middle powers to pool computing capacity.fortune

France Drops Palantir for Domestic Alternative

France moved swiftly to reduce dependence on U.S. technology. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced on Tuesday that the DGSI, France’s domestic intelligence agency, will replace Palantir’s data-analysis tools with software from ChapsVision, a French firm, framing the switch as part of a drive to “build real autonomy.” Lecornu also said all French civil servants would receive access to an AI assistant powered by domestic champion Mistral AI. Reuters reported that the transition from Palantir will unfold over several years to prevent a capability gap.bloomberg

Trust and Fragmentation

Analysts warn the episode could fragment the global AI industry for years. According to Fortune, the EU relies on non-EU countries for more than 80 percent of its technology and 70 percent of its cloud computing, while the U.S. and China together control roughly 90 percent of global AI computing infrastructure. Jonathan Iwry, a fellow at the Wharton Accountable AI Lab, told Fortune that “exercising unilateral control might increase U.S. leverage in the short term, but it could also encourage allies to reduce their dependence on American AI over the longer term.”fortune

The European Commission had already unveiled its European Technological Sovereignty Package on June 3, targeting €422 billion in investment across semiconductors, data centers, and AI over the next decade. But Oxford professor Sandra Wachter captured the broader sentiment: “This is something that we have always known, but never really felt. We have never quite felt what it’s meant to be on the shorter side of the stick — on the side that actually has to face the kill switch.”williamfry