What Anthropic’s Forced Shutdown Means for European Sovereignty
4d 7h ago by lemmy.ca/u/streetfestival in canada@lemmy.ca from pixelunion.eu
Imagine a lead developer in Berlin or a security researcher in Paris ending their Thursday with the most sophisticated coding partner ever built, only to wake up on Friday, June 12, 2026, to a 403 Forbidden error. This was no routine maintenance window or technical glitch; it was a geopolitical foreclosure. Overnight, Anthropic’s “Mythos-class” models, the revolutionary Claude Fable 5 and its internal progenitor, Mythos 5, were silenced across Europe by a direct order from the U.S. government. At PixelUnion, we have long been a voorvechter (advocate) for European technical autonomy, and we view this blackout as the ultimate “canary in the coal mine.” It is a brutal reminder that when you plug into someone else’s power grid, the owner can cut the current without warning.
Let's buy some more F-35s and deepen our tech dependence on US companies! 🥴 (/s). What a #$ing waste of money and massive risk that US will brick or seize things bought from US
Remember when secure cryptography used the same export license from the US as nuclear weapons?
Yeah; we’re back there again.
~3 years ago I had the same experience when I opened Apollo and it no longer worked with Reddit.
The world kind of learned this recently when Ebola outbreak started and nobody else had stepped up to fill the void the US left.
Really 3 years? I thought it was longer than that I last posted or logged into reddit a little over a year ago.
shattered the myth of the 'safe American cloud'
That myth has been shattered for a very long time.
I don't understand why people still believe that old lie?
Anthropic is probably just late on paying Trump the "protection money."
Something a lot of people seemingly haven't come to terms with is the fact that the US is a mafia state. Fraud has been decriminalized for any company that pays the vig. You have to do a lot more due diligence on any US company because they can just straight up lie to get investment. There's no longer any consequences for lying to sucker people into investing in their companies. There wasn't all that much before, but now there's none.
Anthropic will pay some bribes and do as Trump wants then they will be allowed to do business with other countries again. But it's obviously a bad idea to do business with them even after that happens.
Maybe the west should haven't depended on a foreign country for all their tech needs. Or allowed those companies to purchase any glimmer of their tech industry.
Could you imagine finding out in 2010 from a memo that looked like this:
Sorry, we need to let go half of workforce because we've decided we're not going to continue to do business with a country. There's no reason to do so at this moment, but we just get the vibe that this country will make a real estate grifter their leader because they saw him on a reality show and mostly out of spite for half of the population of their own country.
Hindsight is 20/20. Yeah it's super obvious now doing business with the US is a bad idea, but most of the things that are happening now would've been too unrealistic to put into a fictional story. Even a comedy couldn't credibly go this far. The Colbert Report wouldn't even suggest anything on the level of insanity we see out of the US every day. It wouldn't get any laughs it would've just confused the audience.
The US is beyond a joke now, nobody could've saw this coming.
What prevents me from running litellm in AWS us-east-2 and bedrock call Fable, then wireguard over from anywhere? Seems like a stupid waste of time and money which is right in line with the current nonces in the WH.
The US doesn't care what jurisdiction you're in. If they want to go after you then they will.
Well right now the model is entirely turned off, but it seems the US government wants Anthropic (and I guess as a result AWS) to first verify that you have US citizenship before they'll enable it on your account. It's not just blocking on where your IP is located; non-US citizens living in the United States are supposed to be denied access. So in your scenario, AWS wouldn't enable Fable on your account until I guess you show them your passport or something. Though I think even that won't be enough; what if the AWS account is for an America company and later they have a non-US citizen employee? I'm not sure AWS Bedrock can support this use-case.
This is just a practice run shot across the bow for requiring that only individuals who have sworn allegiance to Der Fuhrer are given access.
OK, how does this work in practice? Let’s say you’re a US citizen working for a multinational corporation and you use AWS Bedrock in your pipeline. The output of that pipeline is consumed by customers all over the world. The AWS account is paid for by your company.
Because the company is multinational, are you denied access? Or because you’re a verified US citizen, do you have access? But that access means that other coworkers who also have Bedrock access also need to have the same models as you, or they won’t be able to do code review, QA, and the rest — AND the model might be exposed to customers if they figure out a jailbreak.
Yeah, that's why I think AWS can't support this situation. If the US doesn't drop their order, I think the only way Anthropic could commercialize these models would be if they disallowed any API usage and tied authentication to developer-specific accounts. So your employer might pay for every eligible employee to have an account, and Anthropic validates their citizenship, but there's no using Fable for automated code review or QA or whatever; all use must be restricted and tied to specific authorized humans. That completely rules out AWS.
It’s also not going to work in practice. Only the people you’re fine with having access will abide by the terms.
Need a verified government ID to use it.
Yeah there may be some legal kerfuffle. But I want to point to the crypto example. MIT Kerberos fell under that restriction and Heimdall was created almost immediately. You can't ultimately restrict software, non physical, easily copiable items. This is just going to blow over.
And what about non US employees of companies working abroad? How will they prevent companies from allowing this?
Is that a pop poking its head over the horizon?