World leaders want American AI, they just don't want America to be able to turn it off
After Trump banned Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5, the world is asking: if AI can be shut off overnight, can we really rely on it?
On June 17, at the G7 Summit lunch, French President Macron addressed a room that included Donald Trump, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Macron warned that if the US could 'from one day to the next turn off the switch,' it wouldn't just hurt European customers — it would damage the AI companies themselves.
This came days after the Trump administration blocked Anthropic from exporting its two most powerful models — Mythos 5 and Fable 5 — on national security grounds. Amazon had flagged to the White House that certain safety guardrails on Fable 5 could be bypassed. Anthropic responded by suspending access to both models worldwide. 76 cybersecurity experts signed an open letter protesting the ban, arguing it took the best defense tools away from defenders.
Indian PM Modi also expressed concern at the summit, saying democratic nations must have 'unfettered access to top AI models' to protect critical infrastructure. Aidan Gomez, CEO of Canadian AI firm Cohere, said in a statement: 'Digital sovereignty is not just about market competition. It's about who controls the foundational technology that will shape our economic security and national sovereignty for decades to come.'
BenPig looked at this news and thought: Huh? Wasn't AI development supposed to be unstoppable? One phone call, one internal report, and two top-tier models just vanish. At the G7 Summit, world leaders weren't discussing how to use AI — they were discussing how to stop the US from turning it off.
G7 also discussed setting up a 'trusted partners' scheme — a way for non-US nations to access advanced Anthropic and OpenAI models without US restrictions. But BenPig thinks weird things are worth writing down. Who's to say what's 'trusted' today will still be 'trusted' tomorrow?