"Meanwhile, Anthropic’s competitors have friends up and down the administration — the Kushners are heavily invested in OpenAI, as an example.2 So another way to read this is that this is an opportunity for other labs to give Anthropic a black eye. Fable is, by all accounts, an incredibly strong model. Very convenient that it’s no longer available for consumers, especially right as Anthropic is about to IPO."

This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.

But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.

> 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'.

Given everything else this administration has done, you now decide to accept their stated intentions at face value?

A requirement of digital sovereignty is the ability to build competitive digital companies. It seems unlikely to me at this point that the EU is going to turn that ship around.