Trump's Anthropic bombshell forces a reckoning — Europe is algorithmic roadkill in a two-horse race

This week the leaders of Europe, Japan and Canada are getting a reminder of their “middle power” status in spades. President Donald Trump, eager to flex his geopolitical UFC muscles after an inglorious Iran campaign, is pressuring allies to fall in line on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. And China, whose export engine threatens to hollow out what’s left of European industry, is rebuffing more robust attempts to get it to play fair on trade..By Lionel Laurent.Yet it’s the Wednesday G7 meal with the “AI Three” — Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis — that may turn out to be the most significant. Their companies’ gigantic valuations rival the output of entire nations, while their technology holds both the promise of corporate productivity gains and the menace of warfare (real and informational). And they’re American, more evidence of Europe’s tech subservience.Just what that means was driven home this week when the White House blocked access for foreigners to Anthropic’s most powerful new models such as Mythos. It’s still not clear what was behind the Trump administration’s incredibly blunt-force move, ostensibly made in the name of AI safety but with political undertones given the Pentagon’s past skirmishes with Amodei’s company.It could be that Anthropic was a little too good at bigging up the scariness of its large language models, and the potential for misuse in the wrong hands. “You reap what you sow,” AI guru Yann LeCun said at the weekend.Regardless of the murky backstory, this is only the latest reminder that Europe and midsized friends like Canada appear to have no say in the technology on which they’ll increasingly depend. “The security rationale, applied consistently, would extend to other US frontier models,” writes Bloomberg Economics’ Michael Deng, referring to the most cutting edge AI. This would put “the entire US AI sector’s access to foreign markets under question,” he adds.Trumpian tech blackmail is already pushing Europe to create AI champions of its own like France’s Mistral, and local alternatives to dominant US cloud companies. But the Anthropic ban is a five-alarm fire. Hence the need for new thinking among the second-rank powers, who face becoming algorithmic roadkill in a two-horse race for supremacy between Washington and Beijing.For a glimpse of the worst-case scenario, have a read of Europe 2031, an entertaining piece of tech policy agit-prop packaged as a dystopian novella that was pulled together by a bunch of European tech experts and a venture capitalist. It imagines access to frontier models becoming ever more necessary for Europe’s economy but ever scarcer as the Americans cut off access. The result is a weakened, divided EU that can only look on as the US takes over its sole tech champion ASML Holding NV, a Dutch company that makes equipment for chip firms.It’s been quaint this week to see the G7 — that talking shop for downwardly mobile world powers, plus the US — follow the White House’s Anthropic bombshell by issuing a draft communique pledging to “discuss” the opportunities and risks of AI for the financial sector. Bankers have been among the keenest adopters of Anthropic’s tools, and a likely point of failure if the tech is used for cyberattacks. Cutting them off is not ideal.Obviously, more mere words from the G7 or the EU are not enough. The Europe 2031 authors call for a coalition of middle powers to exert genuine leverage over AI’s global availability, driven in part by the vast continental investments being made in data centers. Local AI wannabes such as Mistral, said to be raising funds at a €20 billion ($23 billion) valuation, are painted as nice-to-have but ultimately toothless. “Europe’s response cannot simply be to hope access will remain open,” according to the authors.The call for political courage is right. But instead of simply trying to build 20% of the world’s computing power — largely for the benefit of American AI companies — it might be better to play to Europe’s strengths. Its share of the semiconductor supply chain is often reduced to ASML, whose market value is more than $700 billion (supersized for a European business). Yet the local ecosystem also includes German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG, Carl Zeiss AG for optics and new semiconductor hubs sprouting in Poland and elsewhere.More investment and political protection within a smaller group of EU countries, such as the “E6” core economies — Germany, France, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands and Spain — looking at capital markets reform, would be a meaningful response to a US that’s openly playing at AI nationalism.And while Europe has had its share of past embarrassments from pursuing Emmanuel Macron-style tech sovereignty — from Minitel, a rival to the internet, to Google challenger Qwant — the case is becoming compelling for good-enough homegrown tech that costs less than the US version and has fewer strings attached. France’s spooks have dumped Palantir Technologies Inc. for a local alternative. They won’t be the last..Read more:.FT: How Anthropic achieved AI coding breakthroughs — and rattled business.Of course, the odds are high that this “Mythos Moment” goes the way of other blinding realizations about Trump, from Liberation Day to Greenland. There’s a screaming alarm followed by a hit of the EU’s proverbial snooze button. But at a time when the first trillionaires are being minted by a US stock market with seemingly intergalactic pulling power, this moment matters..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Trump's Anthropic bombshell forces a reckoning — Europe is algorithmic roadkill in a two-horse race

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