US export ban on Anthropic’s AI models further strains alliances

French President Emmanuel Macron and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei attend a working lunch with G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners and global tech CEOs on innovation and AI during the G7 Summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, on June 17, 2026 [Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters]

US allies are now waking up to the realisation that they are “far too vulnerable now to the US techno-industrial complex,” Dex Hunter-Torricke, president of the Center for Tomorrow, told Al Jazeera.

Macron also stressed the need for countries to work together on addressing AI issues, warning against the danger posed by “non-cooperation between democracies”.

Macron’s remarks were echoed by Thomas Regnier, European Commission spokesperson for tech sovereignty, who told Al Jazeera that addressing security concerns was a “shared challenge, not one confined to a single jurisdiction or country”.

The solution should also not be “discriminatory against partners,” Regnier said. 

At the closed-door meeting, the G7 countries – the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the US – discussed a potential “trusted partner” scheme for access to the most advanced AI models, though few details have been disclosed.

The US briefly introduced a similar tiered model for the semiconductor chips that power AI in early 2025 during the last weeks of US President Joe Biden’s presidency**.**

Known as the “small yard, high fence” model in public policy circles, the scheme was intended to keep the most advanced US tech away from the likes of China and Russia, but it also created some “disquiet” among allies, said David Smith, an expert in US politics and foreign policy at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre.

The scheme did not restrict allied access to semiconductors, but set out to restrict what they could do with those chips, including in a commercial setting or in their trade dealings with China.

“This was controversial because of the fact that in the past, when the US has restricted the export of certain technologies, they have always been things with direct military applications,” Smith told Al Jazeera.

“Restricting access to advanced chips was very different.”

An NVIDIA logo and a computer motherboard appear in this illustration taken on August 25, 2025 [Dado Ruvic/Reuters]

The scheme was scrapped in May 2025 by the Trump administration – which later cleared the powerful Nvidia H200 chip for sale to a limited number of Chinese firms.

The Anthropic ban is, meanwhile, accelerating calls for more self-reliance among US allies.

“The situation we’re in collectively right now with Mythos and Fable is something that can happen with over-reliance,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told the media ahead of the G7 summit.

“Nobody has done anything wrong in the situation. But we will have done something wrong if we just accept this, don’t take the lesson, don’t build out and diversify.”

Bruno Retailleau, a former French minister and candidate in the 2027 presidential election, said Anthropic should be a “wake-up call” to Europe that “a nation that depends on others for its technology is a nation that can be unplugged overnight”.

“We must treat AI the way we treated nuclear power: we must think of it as part of our sovereignty. Master it or suffer it: there is no other path,” Retailleau said on X on Saturday, the day after the ban was put in place.

Tom Tugendhat, a former security minister under Conservative Prime Ministers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, said the incident was the “inevitable result of technology shaping warfare so that sovereignty is more about code than cannons”.

“We cannot continue like this and remain sovereign,” Tugendhat said on X on Saturday.

The Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken on May 20, 2024 [File: Dado Ruvic/Reuters]

Marcin Jerzewski, head of the Taiwan office of the European Values Center for Security Policy, said that European companies could come out ahead in the Anthropic controversy.

Prior to the Anthropic ban, German media reported in April that the country’s armed forces would not award contracts to Palantir – Peter Thiel’s big data analytics company that partners with law enforcement, defence and intelligence agencies – ‌citing concerns about granting private industry access to national data systems.

Germany and France’s domestic spy agencies have also recently partnered with European companies over Palantir so as to avoid becoming too dependent on US technology, according to officials.

As Anthropic has stoked discussion about the need for AI sovereignty, it has also drawn attention to Paris-based AI startup Mistral, the “EU’s only major homegrown frontier-model competitor”, Jerzewski told Al Jazeera.

“Overall, European governments are growing uneasy about their overreliance on US-controlled technologies,” he said.

“To this end, European companies might benefit from the Anthropic incident.”