When the US government ordered Anthropic to cut foreign access to its most capable models, and the company switched them off worldwide rather than try to comply selectively, it handed every advocate of home-grown AI a tidy piece of evidence. Sung Kim, chief executive of the South Korean startup Upstage, picked it up at a briefing in Seoul on Tuesday.
“AI is no longer just a service or a tool we use; it has become a strategic national asset,” Kim told reporters, according to Bloomberg. The countries that control the foundational technology, he argued, the United States and China, can withdraw access whenever it suits them.
His conclusion was the one his company is built to serve: “We need to advance our own technology as quickly as possible and become as self-reliant as we can.”
The remarks land on a specific event. Anthropic disabled its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all customers earlier this month after a US directive barred foreign nationals from using them, the first export-control measure aimed at particular AI models rather than at chips. For users outside the United States, the lesson was blunt: a tool they had built around could vanish on a decision made in another capital.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!Kim’s framing is self-interested, and he would not pretend otherwise. Upstage is one of the companies that stands to gain if South Korea decides its AI should run on models it controls, and the sovereign-AI argument is, for him, also a business case. That does not make the underlying point wrong, only worth reading with the speaker’s position in view.
