🔒 Sovereignty for rent
You can regulate machines you didn’t build and ride in cars you don’t drive—for a while. Sovereignty you don’t build is for rent. And any lease can be terminated.
This past weekend, arguably the most powerful AI model went dark—not because of an outage or a hack. Fable 5 by Anthropic disappeared from the internet a few days after launch because the U.S. Department of Commerce placed it under export controls and barred foreign nationals from using it. The only way to comply with that order was to shut the model down entirely, since implementing digital citizenship checks wasn’t going to be straightforward. So the company turned it off—for everyone, worldwide.
From a European user’s perspective, it seemed ridiculously simple. Yesterday it worked. Today it doesn’t. Someone on the other side of the ocean pulled the plug, and we didn’t even know we were plugged into it. And that’s, in essence, the whole story of European technological sovereignty packed into one weekend.
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