Inside Amazon, a single safety flag was raised against Anthropic’s newest Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models. Days later, the Trump administration blocked their export on national security grounds. Within a week, the heads of two of the world’s largest democracies were sitting in a room with Donald Trump, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman, asking the question that flag had suddenly made urgent.
At the G7 Summit, French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pressed it directly: what happens to a country’s economy when the AI models it depends on can be switched off by a foreign government?
The trigger: Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5 export block
The proximate cause is recent. Days before the summit, the Trump administration blocked Anthropic from exporting its newest Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models on national security grounds. The order followed Amazon flagging to the White House that certain safety guardrails in the models could be bypassed.
Cybersecurity experts have since pointed out that the capabilities cited by the government are also present in freely available models, including from OpenAI. Anthropic’s models remain frozen anyway.
For governments and enterprises that had built workflows on top of those models, the lesson was immediate: access can be revoked overnight, for reasons that may never be disclosed.
Macron and Modi articulate the structural risk
Macron warned that the U.S. could revoke access to AI infrastructure overnight, harming European customers’ economies and damaging American AI firms themselves. Modi, sitting across the table, said democratic nations must have unfettered access to top AI models to protect critical infrastructure.
The framing matters. Two heads of state from the world’s largest democracies are describing American AI infrastructure the way energy ministers describe a pipeline running through hostile territory: useful, indispensable, and a strategic liability.
The ‘trusted partners’ workaround
G7 leaders discussed creating a trusted partners scheme that would grant non-U.S. nations and companies access to advanced models from firms like Anthropic and OpenAI, conditional on using them to harden defences against rivals such as China. Macron argued Washington should back the framework and broaden Mythos access, on the simple commercial logic that nobody will buy U.S. AI if it can disappear overnight.
The unresolved question is scope. It is unclear whether a startup in Paris or Bangalore whose product breaks without warning would qualify for protection, or whether the scheme covers only sovereign customers and large enterprises.
The sovereign AI scramble accelerates
Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Canadian enterprise AI firm Cohere, said the episode confirmed what his company had long argued: that dependence on a small handful of big tech companies is dangerous to the resilience of companies and democratic nations alike. He described digital sovereignty as a question of control over the foundational technology that will shape economic security and national sovereignty for decades to come. That message is landing. The Anthropic shutdown has triggered a global scramble for sovereign AI capacity, and Silicon Canals has previously examined how Africa’s $60B AI sovereignty plan still runs through 12,000 Nvidia GPUs and Big Tech infrastructure, a contradiction now visible at the G7 level.
What the episode reveals about the AI export stack
The structural picture is straightforward. American frontier labs are subject to U.S. export controls. Those controls can be triggered by a single corporate disclosure, in this case Amazon’s safety flag, and applied to models whose capabilities are not meaningfully different from competitors that remain on the market. International customers absorb the political risk. American firms absorb the lost revenue. The U.S. government retains the kill switch.
Macron’s point to Trump was commercial rather than ideological: a kill switch known to exist devalues the product attached to it. The G7 discussions are an attempt to negotiate a contractual ceiling on that switch. Whether Washington agrees will determine whether American AI remains a global default or becomes, like American payment rails before it, a system other powers feel compelled to route around.
