Austria urges EU to host Anthropic after US export controls cut European AI access

Austria asks the EU to consider giving Anthropic a home in Europe

Vienna has urged Brussels to explore hosting the American AI company inside the bloc, after Washington cut foreign access to its most powerful models. European government has, in writing, asked the European Union to find a way to host an American artificial-intelligence company. The request is unusual enough that the official making it conceded, in the same breath, that people would doubt it could be done. The official is Alexander Pröll, Austria's state secretary for digitalisation, and the company is Anthropic. In a letter to Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission's executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, Pröll urged member states to explore "the strategic establishment and participation of Anthropic within the European Union," according to Bloomberg, which first reported the letter. The trigger is recent and specific. Earlier this month the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut off foreign nationals' access to its two most advanced systems, citing national security. Anthropic, unable to fence off a shared cloud service by nationality, switched the models off for everyone outside the United States. A nationality-based restriction became, in practice, a global outage, and Europe found itself on the wrong side of it. Pröll's pitch is that Europe should not simply absorb that. "Let us jointly explore the strategic establishment and participation of Anthropic within the European Union," he wrote, "with legal certainty, market access, capital and a set of values that suits this company." The framing is courtship rather than command: offer Anthropic a jurisdiction, and in return secure the continent's access to a frontier model it cannot currently rely on. He did not say how any of it would work. The letter does not specify whether Austria envisages a European subsidiary, a data-residency arrangement, an equity stake, or something looser, and Pröll acknowledged there would be scepticism about whether the idea was feasible at all. What he insisted on was the stakes: that Europe must not be cut off from major innovations, and that being a customer is not the same as having a guarantee. That argument has been building in Brussels for weeks. The Commission had already held talks with Washington over restoring European access after the export order, an episode that exposed how exposed the bloc is to a US policy decision over which it has no vote. Austria's letter is the same anxiety, pushed one step further: rather than negotiate access, secure presence. It also runs against the grain of the EU's own sovereignty rhetoric, which has tended to favour homegrown champions. Much of that conversation has centred on Mistral, the French model-maker positioned as Europe's answer to the American labs. Inviting an American company onto European soil is a different theory of sovereignty entirely, one that prizes guaranteed access over domestic ownership, and the two ideas do not sit comfortably together. Whether the Commission entertains the proposal is an open question. Virkkunen's office had not publicly responded to the letter, and any move of this kind would involve legal, competition, and security questions that no single member state can settle. Austria, for its part, has put the option on the table and dared the rest of the bloc to say it is impossible. The deeper point is the one Pröll left implicit. For all the talk of European AI independence, the continent's most immediate problem this month was that a model it wanted to use stopped working because of a decision made in Washington. A letter cannot fix that, it can, at least, name it.

Brussels held talks with Washington over Anthropic access after Fable 5 ban

Brussels opened talks with Washington over Anthropic after a US export-control order cut Europe off from the company's two most capable models, ENISA included. To get its hands on an American AI model, the European Union has had to negotiate not with the company that makes it but with the government that can switch it off. Brussels held talks with the White House over access to Anthropic's most advanced systems, after a US export-control order abruptly cut Europe off from them in mid-June. The detail worth sitting with is the chain of command: the EU's route back to the technology runs through Washington, not through Anthropic. The cutoff came on 12 June. The US Commerce Department, in a letter signed by Secretary Howard Lutnick and drafted with the Bureau of Industry and Security, ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including the company's own non-citizen staff. Unable to verify nationality inside shared cloud infrastructure, Anthropic disabled both models worldwide. Its less powerful Claude models, including Claude Opus 4.8, were not affected. The stated rationale was a jailbreak. Officials acted after learning of a technique to bypass the models' safeguards, a concern reportedly surfaced by researchers at Amazon, Anthropic's largest investor. Anthropic pushed back on the breadth of the response, arguing the jailbreak was narrow, unlocking a specific Mythos cybersecurity capability in one instance rather than defeating Fable 5's safeguards wholesale, and therefore did not justify pulling access so widely. For Europe, the timing stung. Only days earlier, Anthropic had been in talks to give the EU's cybersecurity agency, ENISA, access to Mythos, which would have been the first time the model was extended beyond the US and the UK. European governments, companies, and research institutions that had gained access under Anthropic's Project Glasswing, ENISA and NATO among them, were cut off with no notice and no timeline for return. The order spared no allies. Downing Street pressed the White House for a UK carve-out and was told there was "zero chance," a flat refusal that made clear how little room foreign capitals had to negotiate the terms of access to a private American product. That is the backdrop to the EU's own approach to Washington. The political reaction across Europe was immediate, and it pointed inward. French leaders called on Paris to accelerate its backing for Mistral, the EU's only serious frontier-model contender, and the episode hardened a broader argument that dependence on American technology is a strategic exposure rather than a procurement choice. A model you can be barred from by another government's order is not infrastructure you control. The standoff has since shown signs of thawing. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei met Donald Trump at the G7 summit in France, an encounter that appeared to soften the president's stance, with Trump later saying he no longer viewed the company as a national security threat. If that translates into restored European access, and on what conditions, is the open question. For now, the EU has learned where the off switch sits, and it is not in Brussels.

EU and White House Met on Anthropic Access Following Ban | PYMNTS.com

The discussions between the European Union (EU) and the White House came after the latter banned foreign nationals and companies from accessing the latest iterations of the artificial intelligence (AI) startup's models, Bloomberg News reported Thursday (June 25). The EU discussed the ban during a trip to Washington this week by a top policymaker, European Commission Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen told Bloomberg. "I have also addressed that myself with the Trump administration," Virkkunen said. "And also we have been speaking with Anthropic." The report notes that Anthropic had initially given the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity access to its Mythos model at the start of June, making it the first EU body granted use of the powerful tool. In the U.S., the company had limited access to federal government departments and a select few of major tech and financial companies. Anthropic has said it believes the ban came after the government learned it was possible to "jailbreak" its Fable 5 model, which the company had kept from performing cybersecurity tasks. Anthropic has since held discussions with the government to restore access to the models. Interviewed by Bloomberg in Milan, Virkkunen said Europe needs access to the advanced AI models, which can detect weaknesses in information and communications technology supply chains. She also said the EU needs to work on its own AI capabilities and rely less on single companies or other non-European countries. The EC is readying an action plan on AI and cybersecurity, which is scheduled to be adopted next month, Virkkunen added. The news comes one day after the European Central Bank (ECB) released a study showing that AI adoption is limited among businesses in the region. The report found that while 70% of firms surveyed were AI users, very few companies within the euro area use the technology "intensively," meaning more than infrequent or moderate usage. "Nearly half of the firms that were not using AI in 2025 plan to invest in it in 2026," ECB wrote on its blog. "At the same time, most firms report using AI only infrequently or moderately, with only 7% of euro area firms reporting intensive use." The research also found that although the likelihood of AI adoption increases along with the size of the company, intensive usage is more common for smaller and newer businesses.

Austria urges Europe to host Anthropic following US curbs on AI access

VIENNA, June 28 (Reuters) - Austria has proposed that the European Union should consider hosting Anthropic within the bloc's borders in order to counter efforts by the United States to block foreigners from using the AI company's most advanced models. In a letter to EU Technology Commissioner Henna Virkkunen released by the Austrian government, Austria's State Secretary for Digitalization Alexander Proell wrote it was important that Europe was not cut off from major innovations. "Let us jointly explore the strategic establishment and participation of Anthropic within the European Union. With legal certainty, market access, capital and a set of values that suits this company," Proell said in the letter. He did not say how the step could be taken and acknowledged there would be scepticism about whether it was possible. "The real question is not whether it is easy," Proell wrote. "The question is whether we Europeans are prepared to be the architects of our technological future, or whether we wish to remain mere administrators of decisions made elsewhere." Anthropic did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the Austrian proposal. Earlier this month, the European Commission proposed laws to boost domestic cloud, AI and semiconductor industries and cut reliance on U.S. Big Tech, defying U.S. government criticism of the bloc's crackdown ?on its industry. (Reporting by Francois Murphy in Vienna and Sumedha Mukherjee and Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Helen Popper)