A few days ago I wrote about the G7 summit in Évian — that was the preview. Now we know how it played out. And the outcome was blunter than I expected.
‘Digital serfdom’
On June 17, French President Macron and Indian PM Modi issued a warning that cuts to the bone: any country relying on American AI risks having access shut off overnight. Macron called it the ‘kill switch’ — a lever the US can pull whenever it wants.
This isn’t hypothetical anymore. Just days earlier, the Trump administration had blocked Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models under export controls. The trigger: Amazon flagged evidence of safety guardrail bypass during internal testing and notified regulators. The ban affects all users outside the US.
Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez had a blunt term for the situation: ‘digital serfdom.’ If you build your entire AI stack on American models, you’re dependent — with no safety net.
What the G7 is planning
The G7 response: a ‘trusted partners’ scheme. The idea is that allied nations would retain preferential access to AI models even when the US imposes export bans. Sounds reasonable on paper. But the core problem remains: as long as the most capable models come from the US, the dependency stays.
Europe is in a particularly tough spot. We don’t have a frontier lab that can compete with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google DeepMind. Mistral is the closest thing — but the gap to the top American models is wide.
What this means in practice
I use Claude every day. For my work as a product manager. For this blog. For prototypes. The idea that this access could vanish tomorrow because geopolitics shifted — that’s uncomfortable.
But it’s also real. The Anthropic export ban shows: one security concern, one policy change, and entire markets get cut off. Europe needs to figure out how it wants to deal with that. Just hoping the US stays friendly isn’t a strategy.
What really gives me pause: the AI labs themselves have no say in this. Anthropic didn’t choose the export ban — it was imposed on them. Which means even if you trust the company, that doesn’t protect you from the government behind it.
I wrote a few days ago that the summit would probably end in a soft closing communique. On substance, I was right — there’s barely any concrete action. But the tone has sharpened. And that alone is news.
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