Austria urges Europe to host Anthropic and compete for AI leadership
Vienna argued that Europe should host Anthropic, not just regulate it, after a U.S. export order cut off foreign access to its top models.
In a June 28 letter to EU Technology Commissioner Henna Virkkunen, State Secretary for Digitalization Alexander Proell urged the European Union to consider hosting Anthropic inside the bloc. The move would keep Europe from being shut out of frontier innovation and give the bloc more control over its technological future.
A June 12 U.S. export-control directive required Anthropic to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for any foreign national, including foreign-national employees. The order forced Anthropic to abruptly disable access to its most advanced models for all users, and a June 23 lawsuit by a U.S. legal technology company challenged the directive that led to the cutoff.
Proell said Europe already has several advantages that could make it a base for frontier AI development: legal certainty, market access, capital and a values system. He did not spell out a legal or corporate structure for how Anthropic could be hosted in Europe, and he acknowledged the proposal would draw skepticism. Anthropic did not immediately comment on the Austrian proposal.
The European Commission unveiled its European Technological Sovereignty Package on June 3, a set of measures aimed at strengthening the EU’s capacity in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud and open source. The package included two legislative proposals, the Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act, and it put Henna Virkkunen, who oversees Digital and Frontier Technologies, at the center of Europe’s effort to shape a competitive and resilient digital future.
Anthropic introduced Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on June 9, just days before the U.S. export-control action. Anthropic said Mythos 5 was built for its most ambitious, long-running projects and had the strongest cybersecurity capabilities of any model it had released, while also planning to expand access through a broader trusted-access program. In February, chief executive Dario Amodei said Anthropic had proactively worked to deploy its models to the Department of War and the intelligence community.
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