{"id":711101,"date":"2026-06-18T08:18:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T08:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/711101\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T08:18:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T08:18:12","slug":"europe-and-its-allies-must-plan-to-offset-the-ai-dependency-risk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/711101\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe and its allies must plan to offset the AI dependency risk"},"content":{"rendered":"

For non-Americans, a 13 June directive, issued by United States Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic, instructing the artificial-intelligence company to allow only US citizens to use its two most powerful models, was a live demonstration of what dependence on foreign AI infrastructure can mean. Anthropic was given only 90 minutes to deny foreign nationals \u2013 including those residing in the US and its own non-American staff \u2013 access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Rather than build nationality-based controls at such short notice, it withdrew both models from the market altogether.<\/p>\n

The official justification for the US move, which affects researchers, doctors, educators, developers and civil servants in more than a hundred countries, including European Union countries, was\u00a0cybersecurity<\/a>. Fable 5 had proved unusually good at finding software vulnerabilities, raising fears it could be used in cyberattacks. The concern may be legitimate and the US administration asserted the right to decide who should be permitted to use a given tier of AI capability.<\/p>\n

This is the structural condition behind what can be called the N-2 problem. Only the United States and China are building full-stack AI sovereignty: the chips, models, clouds, energy, talent and legal frameworks that together amount to genuine independence. Everyone else lives in managed dependence. The Fable and Mythos directive has made that clear.<\/p>\n

The closest parallel is the US\u2019s \u2018exorbitant privilege\u2019 as issuer of the world\u2019s reserve currency. Dollar dependence has shaped states\u2019 macroeconomic autonomy for half a century, from borrowing costs to vulnerability to sanctions. AI dependence reaches even deeper, into public health, judicial administration, agricultural planning and national security, for example.<\/p>\n

US export controls introduced from 2022 on the\u00a0semiconductors that can be sold to China<\/a> offered an early glimpse of the vulnerability such dependence can create. But while chip controls take effect over months, enabling supply chains to adjust, and substitutes and workarounds to be found, an AI model-access directive bites instantly. Software has no supply chain and no immediate substitutes. Access to AI models is therefore a far riskier dependence than access to semiconductors.<\/p>\n

In response, Europe and other jurisdictions must accept that geopolitics, security and the domestic politics of the US and China guarantee that AI access controls will remain an instrument of statecraft. However, in response, not every country can build its own frontier laboratory; the capital, computing power, talent and time required put that beyond all but a handful of states.<\/p>\n

The realistic answer is collective programmable sovereignty: a coalition of complementary economies that together hold enough of the AI stack to make up a distributed third option. This would involve, for example, compute in Taiwan and South Korea, data and talent in India, energy in the Gulf, regulation and foundational research in Europe, large consumer markets in Brazil and Indonesia.<\/p>\n

With a combined GDP exceeding that of the US, this group would have the heft to negotiate with global AI providers on its own terms, similarly to how the EU\u2019s single market has made EU data-protection rules into a standard that US firms observe regardless of preference. The building blocks already exist; what is missing is the political decision to assemble them before the next US directive arrives.<\/p>\n

This would not end dependence on US or Chinese technology, but it would provide strategic options. Sovereignty in the AI era does not require owning every chip or training every model. It requires the capacity to create AI resilience \u2013 to reduce systemic dependence while remaining integrated into the global AI ecosystem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The question is not whether a move similar to Lutnick\u2019s directive will happen again, but whether the world will have built a resilient, plural AI architecture by the time it does. Resilience requires real alternative options that can be activated. Just as countries diversify energy supplies, reserve currencies and critical infrastructure, they must diversify access to AI intelligence.<\/p>\n

Alicia Garc\u00eda-Herrero is Senior Fellow at Bruegel and Chief Economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis. Soumitra Dutta is Director at Portulans Institute, former Founding Dean of Cornell University\u2019s SC Johnson College of Business and creator of the Global Innovation Index.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For non-Americans, a 13 June directive, issued by United States Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic, instructing the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":711102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-711101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/711102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}