The Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals from its two most capable models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, on national-security grounds. Screening every user by nationality proved technically unworkable, so Anthropic took both models offline for everyone rather than enforce the screen. Axios first reported the order on 12 June, and CNBC, Fortune and Anthropic itself later confirmed it.
Christophe Grudler, a French member of the European Parliament, called the move proof that the US holds "a real kill-switch over essential technologies". A European Commission spokesperson said firms must comply with EU legislation whatever their home government demands. The cut reached inside the bloc's own institutions: the EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) had been admitted to Anthropic's Project Glasswing government-access programme in April, then lost access to the relevant models within weeks of joining.
Bruegel had already documented that Europe depends structurally on US or Chinese compute despite its sovereignty drive. A single US order cutting off two frontier models for every European user at once is the first working instance of the dependency that analysis described. European enterprises now know the capability they license from an American lab can be revoked by an American agency, not the vendor, and the design of the product cannot stop it.
