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.
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!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.”
