This past weekend, arguably the most powerful AI model went dark\u2014not 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\u2019t going to be straightforward. So the company turned it off\u2014for everyone, worldwide.<\/p>
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.<\/p>
History loves scenes like this. In 1956, Great Britain and France, two empires with a fading belief in their own power, marched into Egypt after the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Militarily, things were going their way. But it wasn\u2019t the Egyptian army that ended the operation\u2014it was Washington, which threatened to dump the pound sterling and cut London off from IMF assistance. The British capitulated within a few days. Eisenhower didn\u2019t send a single soldier. Instead, he pulled the financial lever, and the two colonial powers discovered their sovereignty was plugged into an American outlet.<\/p>
Shutting Fable down is a scene we\u2019ve already watched play out in the digital realm, too. In the 1990s, the U.S. government treated strong encryption like a weapon. Literally: cryptographic software was classified as munitions, and exporting it required a license\u2014just like selling rifles. When Phil Zimmermann released PGP, an email encryption program, and the code spread around the world, he faced an investigation for exporting munitions without a license. The case wasn\u2019t dropped until 1996. So the idea that lines of code are strategic material you can stop at the border is thirty years old. What\u2019s changed is that today that code is a cloud-based language model, and the border is citizenship.<\/p>
Europe has probably only once in its history really managed to unplug from someone else’s outlet. The Galileo European satellite navigation system came about in part because the American GPS was, and remains, controlled by the military, which until 2000 deliberately degraded the quality of the civilian signal and, in the event of conflict, could simply switch it off over a chosen area. Europe decided it didn’t want its planes and smartphones depending on a switch in the Pentagon. Galileo cost billions and suffered years of delays. But it works, and it’s ours. A rare case of Europe building infrastructure instead of writing a regulation.<\/p>
Building your own can be a trap. In the 1980s, France created Minitel\u2014a network of terminals that let millions of French people buy tickets and read the news before anyone in Europe had heard of the internet. For a decade, it was a point of pride. Then it turned into an anchor. The closed, national system proved a dead end when the open internet arrived, and France spent years catching up. It\u2019s easy for your own walled garden, cut off from the rest of the world, to turn into a prison.<\/p>
So where is Europe in all this today? Writing the rules. The AI Act, the world\u2019s first comprehensive AI regulation, is an impressive and necessary document. The trouble is, it regulates machines the continent mostly doesn\u2019t build, and it also imposes draconian restrictions in some areas. Mario Draghi put it bluntly in his 2024 report on the EU\u2019s competitiveness: Europe is falling behind in the technologies that will define the coming decades, and the gap with the U.S. and China is widening. We have Mistral and a handful of other ambitious companies, but the very top tier of the most powerful models is American or Chinese. A European who wants to work with the most powerful tool available today logs into someone else\u2019s server and on someone else\u2019s terms.<\/p>
And when you log in to someone else\u2019s server, you\u2019re agreeing to someone else\u2019s law. Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer, twice got the EU\u2019s Court of Justice to strike down data-transfer agreements between Europe and the United States because U.S. surveillance law reached into Europeans\u2019 data and European courts had no control over it. The Court agreed with him. Twice. The conclusion is inconvenient: data stored on a U.S. server are subject to U.S. law, no matter whose they are.<\/p>
As for Fable, an even more intriguing twist emerged. Export controls hit customers outside the US, and along with them foreign nationals employed at Anthropic itself. Some of the people who helped build this model lost access to it overnight because they have the wrong passport. An engineer from Krakow or Lyon helps build the system in the morning, and by the afternoon they can’t run it anymore. Sounds like something out of a dystopian short story. It happened last weekend.<\/p>
The kicker is that the reason was an alleged jailbreak the company itself didn\u2019t consider serious\u2014it talked about a narrow, unconfirmed vulnerability, shared only verbally, which was also present in other models on the market. In other words, it took nothing more than an argument no one even had to put in writing to switch off the lights worldwide.<\/p>
Fable will probably be back online once the lawyers sort it out. But it will leave a question that Europe hasn\u2019t wanted to answer honestly for decades. You can regulate machines you didn\u2019t build and ride in cars you don\u2019t steer\u2014for a while. Sovereignty you don\u2019t build is for rent. And any lease can be terminated: on a Friday afternoon, without warning.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You can regulate machines you didn\u2019t build and ride in cars you don\u2019t drive\u2014for a while. Sovereignty you don\u2019t build is for rent. And any lease can be terminated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":19001,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[796,805],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[],"ppma_author":[614],"class_list":["post-19174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hai-premium-2","category-law-and-ethics"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":614,"user_id":247,"is_guest":0,"slug":"prof-dr-hab-dariusz-jemielniak","display_name":"prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg"},"first_name":"Dariusz","last_name":"Jemielniak","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Profesor zarz\u0105dzania Akademii Leona Ko\u017ami\u0144skiego, gdzie kieruje katedr\u0105 MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies). Pracuje te\u017c jako faculty associate w Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society na Harvardzie. Wiceprezes Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cz\u0142onek Rady Programowej CampusAI."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19175,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19174\/revisions\/19175"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19174"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=19174"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=19174"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=19174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}