At 5:21 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, Anthropic received a Commerce Department directive ordering it to cut foreign nationals off from Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its two most advanced commercial models. By Tuesday, that timestamp had become a diplomatic problem at the G7 summit in Evian.

The instrument was a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, invoking national security authorities and citing, per a Reuters account, the risk that the models could be used by military intelligence services in countries of concern, including China and Russia. Anthropic complied and then dissented in public. “We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” the company said, describing the underlying technique as asking a model to read a codebase and identify software flaws, a capability it noted is available from competing systems, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.

The allies took the point and drew the opposite conclusion. By Tuesday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced a civil service rollout of a tool built on Mistral, and the DGSI, France’s domestic intelligence agency, selected the local firm Chapsvision to replace Palantir software, though Palantir said its multi-year DGSI contract, renewed in late 2025, remained in effect. “We cannot rely on the goodwill of certain partners who, as we have seen in recent days, are capable of cutting off access to the Anthropic model,” Lecornu said.

The reaction in Brussels was sharper. “shows how the U.S. government views Europe: as an enemy, not as a friend and ally,” said Alexandra Geese, a German member of the European Parliament. A draft G7 statement seen by Bloomberg promised to “further discuss emerging opportunities and potential risks arising from AI, notably in the financial sector,” language that reads as a placeholder for an argument the summit hadn’t planned to have.

For European and Canadian competitors, the directive arrived as a sales lead. Cohere’s chief A.I. officer, Joelle Pineau, told Bloomberg Television that inbound inquiries since the ban had been “huge.” Florian Douetteau, who runs the French startup Dataiku, made the same point in a different register. Aleph Alpha, the German firm, is positioned similarly.

White House spokesman Kush Desai described the policy as “collaborating with AI industry leaders to balance cutting-edge innovation with national security concerns.” The structural reading is less generous. Export controls built for semiconductors are being ported to software that allies had quietly assumed was a shared commons. The CoCom-era logic returns, and Europe is no longer sure which side of the wall it’s on.

Sources