Anthropic Case, Austria to the EU: "Let's Bring It to Europe After the US Blockade"
In recent days, the Austrian government has formally requested the European Union to evaluate the establishment of a strategic location for Anthropic in Europe. The request comes from Alexander Pröll, Secretary of State for Digitalization, in a letter addressed to Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, inviting member states to jointly explore this hypothesis.
The move is a direct reaction to a blockade that, since mid-June, has removed access to two of the company's models for clients worldwide. In the letter, Pröll proposes to jointly explore "the strategic establishment and participation of Anthropic within the European Union, with legal certainty, market access, capital, and a set of values suitable for this company," while also acknowledging in the same text that the idea would raise skepticism about its feasibility.
Why the Models Disappeared from the Cloud
On June 12, the U.S. Department of Commerce sent a letter to Anthropic imposing export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5, requiring a BIS license for any access by foreign citizens, both inside and outside the United States, including non-U.S. employees of the same company, in the name of national security.
On a shared cloud service, it is not possible to distinguish in real-time the nationality of those making requests. Anthropic thus entirely disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all global clients, the only way to remain compliant with the order. The pretext for the intervention was a report of a possible jailbreak method for Fable 5 that could identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
The company contested the proportionality of the measure, describing the vulnerability as limited and reproducible with other models already publicly available. According to Anthropic, applying that same standard would effectively "halt all new model deployments for all frontier providers."
A Legal Authority Never Used Like This
The most fragile part of the matter is the legal basis of the order. As CSIS has reconstructed, the BIS's authority to impose export controls on remote access to the models is controversial: the EAR does not explicitly cover cloud access, and the cited interim rule had never before been used as a basis for a worldwide control aimed at a single company.
It is on this ground that Vienna’s initiative fits in. The European Commission had already opened talks with Washington to restore European access to the models, even before the Austrian letter arrived, but Pröll's proposal raises the bar, shifting the discussion from restoring access to the possibility of rooting the company in European territory.
At the moment, it is unclear whether the proposal will be heard in Brussels, and Pröll himself acknowledges the skepticism it will raise. However, the point remains: a single U.S. administrative order has managed to disable two models for the entire global audience, and it is this precedent, more than the Austrian site, that Europe is now called to measure itself against.