Watch: Washington, Anthropic, and the AI kill switch -- can Europe actually build tech independence?

One of the AI race’s leaders, Anthropic, pulled the plug on its top models after a Trump administration directive restricting frontier technology to US citizens. The shutdown, affecting Fable 5 and Mythos 5, illustrates Europe’s vulnerability to sudden outages when relying on US‑made systems in research, hospitals, and industry.

EU policymakers propose aggressive AI sovereignty with the Cloud and AI Development Act, aiming to triple data center capacity and build AI gigafactories alongside open-source options. Yet the compute gap remains wide. Analysts suggest a coalition of middle powers—UK, Canada, Japan—could help Europe pool power, accelerating independence before future kill switches are deployed.