Suddenly, Everyone Is a Sovereigntist

On June 12, at 5:21 p.m. Washington time, the U.S. government sent Anthropic a letter invoking national security. The order fit on a single line: suspend all access to two of its most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for any foreign national, inside or outside the United States, right down to the company's own foreign employees. Unable to sort its customer base by passport before the weekend, Anthropic cut off both models for everyone. The others keep running. But the message arrived with zero latency.

The word to remember is not "suspension." It is "foreign national." In one administrative sentence, an entire continent learned what it was worth in Washington's ledger: foreigners whose access is pulled whenever reasons of state dictate, without notice, without recourse, without the provider, however well disposed, being able to do much about it. It is the first time the United States has drawn export controls not on chips, but on intelligence itself. And it did so in the only direction that concerns us. Out.

The Friday-Night Conversion

By Monday morning, the country had a few million more sovereigntists, and the spectacle is worth savoring while it lasts, because it will not last.

The same people who, for ten years, explained that digital sovereignty was a Brussels fantasy, an affectation of bureaucrats incapable of innovating. The same people who signed five-year contracts with the American hyperscalers because it was simpler, cheaper, better integrated. The same people who moved their data, their processing and sometimes their capital into jurisdictions where the word extraterritoriality is not a lawyer's footnote. The same people who applauded a project billed as the flagship of French sovereignty even though it is financed to the tune of several tens of billions by a Gulf sovereign fund, built around American chips. Those people are discovering, hands on hearts, that the tap can be turned off on them.

Their outrage is sincere. It simply arrived ten years late and pointed the wrong way. Worse: the warning was not even old. It was a month old, it was public, and it had been delivered under oath.

The Witness Nobody Listened To

A few weeks before the cutoff, Arthur Mensch was testifying before the Assemblée nationale at a committee of inquiry into digital dependencies. There, calmly, he laid out the exact mechanics that were about to trip.

His thesis held in one word he repeated relentlessly: leverage. Stop, he said, thinking of sovereignty as isolationism, and think of it the way people who negotiate do, that is, as a balance of power. In a world where you import the entirety of your digital services, you have no leverage over the provider. And whoever has no leverage can be cut off, which becomes, he added, particularly critical for anything touching on sovereign and defense functions. His closing words, before the members of parliament, were "vassal state." A month later, the U.S. Treasury handed him the illustration, free of charge, on the scale of a continent.

There is something more precise still, and it is almost too good. Asked about cyber, Mensch had swept aside what he called the fear marketing of an American competitor, in all likelihood the very one whose models have just been cut off. His argument: yes, the models are excellent programmers, they can uncover vulnerabilities and propose exploits, but that capability rises in a linear, predictable way, everywhere at once, and his own models find exactly the same flaws. Nothing exceptional, then, nothing that warrants treating a model as a weapon apart. A month later, the U.S. government did precisely the opposite: it took that capability, declared it a national security threat, and used it to shut the door on foreigners. Mensch was right on the substance, the capability is unremarkable and the control protects nothing. He was above all right on the politics: it does not matter whether the fear is well founded, a state can always use it as a pretext to unplug you.

That leaves his own answer, which he did not present as a history lesson but which is one. Mistral's whole strategy rests on open models, which he explicitly describes as a technique for decentralization and for displacing established players. Which is, word for word, what won it for the other side the last time we played this game.

We Have Seen This Film Before, and It Was Better Written

Because this game has already been played, back in the 1990s, with a different cast and the same script.

Back then, the weapon the United States wanted to keep for itself was not artificial intelligence, it was encryption. Strong encryption sat on the munitions list, ranked alongside missiles, and exporting good code was legally equivalent to exporting military hardware. In 1991, Phil Zimmermann posts an encryption program online, PGP. It crosses borders, the way software does, and its author draws three years of federal criminal investigation for arms trafficking. To sell the case to the public, the intelligence services explained that this software would mostly serve criminals and pedophiles. It is, word for word and thirty years apart, the fear marketing Mensch denounced, except that the pedophiles have been swapped for hackers.

The best scene remains the T-shirt. In 1995, a cryptographer prints the RSA algorithm in three lines of Perl on T-shirts. The garment is officially a munition, and it is in theory illegal to export it, or even to let a foreign national look at it. The threat to national security fit on a chest. Thirty years on, the munition a foreign national is not allowed to go near is no longer a T-shirt, it is a model.

And there was already a version for the right people and one for the others. Netscape shipped two browsers: the American version encrypted at 128 bits, the international version at 40, deliberately weakened, because beyond 40 bits the software became a weapon again. Foreigners were entitled to junk encryption, and that was deemed reasonable.

Fable, or the 40-Bit of Our Era

That is precisely what Fable was: not the cutting-edge model, but the throttled, guardrailed version released to the public. The Netscape International of 2026. Except that in 1995 foreigners were at least left with their weak version. In 2026, they were first given it, then had it taken back. Call that progress.

The official rationale, incidentally, validates point by point what Mensch had explained to the members of parliament. The model could supposedly read a codebase and dig up flaws in it. Anthropic pointed out, a little wearily, that other public models find the same minor flaws, which was exactly its argument: the capability is universal, so the control locks nothing down. In these affairs, the control is never a lock, it is a piece of theater. The only thing it actually produces is the exclusion of those filed on the wrong side of the border.

Sovereignty in Reaction Is Already a Defeat

That leaves the real subject, and it is unpleasant. Looking for a European alternative the day after a cutoff, under duress, in a hurry, on a timetable set by someone else, is not sovereignty. It is managed dependence, with extra steps and a little more sweat.

Here again, Mensch had described the trap, and this is his most useful part. Nobody deploys tens of billions before seeing the demand. The state, which could signal that demand, does not do so loudly enough. The result is that the players most aggressive with capital, the Americans, invest upstream and grab the resource, electricity included, before the others have moved. Once supply is captured, even if you solve demand, you no longer have the means to produce. And all of this, he warned, plays out within two years. That is the exact gap between knowing and acting: awareness of the risk never closes it, only a decision paid for in advance closes it, or else someone else closes it in your place, at their convenience, by flipping the switch.

There is comic justice all the same. The 1990s export controls mainly succeeded in giving rise to a global cryptography industry beyond American reach and in pushing development toward open source. In trying to deny the world a technology, the United States manufactured its own competitors. Today it relaunches the same experiment on artificial intelligence, with the same quiet conviction, and it is precisely the bet of Mistral and its open models to be the beneficiary. As of today, Washington is probably the best sales rep for European digital sovereignty. No speech in Brussels will have been as convincing as a cutoff on a Friday at 5:21 p.m.

Because that is the only lesson that counts. The quality of your American provider, its values, its professed caution, have no effect on your exposure. Anthropic is not a cowboy: it is the lab that refused to let the U.S. military use its models for fully autonomous weapons systems, and that found itself classified for it by the Pentagon as a supply chain risk, a label usually reserved for hostile powers. The most scrupulous provider became, overnight, the single point of failure of its European customers. Dependence does not run through the provider, it runs through Washington. Your vendor can be on your side and receive the order to cut you off at 5:21 p.m. on a Friday, and its friendship will change nothing.

What Happens Now

Access will probably be restored. Anthropic talks of a misunderstanding, disputes the severity of the circumvention it is accused of, and is working to have the measure lifted. As in the 1990s, common sense will most likely prevail in the end, after a few years of proceedings and one or two resounding rulings. And that is exactly the moment to watch the room.

Because the day the two models come back, the Friday-night converts will fall silent. They will return to their contracts, their integrations, their convenience, and forget they were, for a moment, Europeans. That silence will be the real information. It will say that Mensch's testimony was heard the way one hears the weather forecast, that the incident was filed as an outage and not as a demonstration, and that the next cutoff, which will not necessarily be a misunderstanding, will find us in the same state of unpreparedness, with the same ready-made outrage.

The cypherpunks, for their part, understood the first time around. They wrote the manifesto, printed the T-shirt and kept writing code that no one could recall. Mensch, in his CEO's way, says the same thing: the only sovereignty that holds is the one you build in advance, open and hard to unplug. The question, on our side, is whether we intend once again to settle for being the audience.

Sovereignty is not an emotion you feel when the provider turns hostile. It is a cost you accept while everything still works. Until we have internalized that sentence, we will keep producing Monday-morning sovereigntists, and the switch will stay on the other side of the Atlantic.