Who controls the infrastructure controls access

In a statement published June 12, 2026 (https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access), Anthropic announced it had taken Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline for all customers globally. The reason was a US export control directive requiring Anthropic to suspend access for any foreign national, including its own foreign-national employees. To comply, Anthropic disabled both models for every customer. What is said to have triggered the directive, according to heise (https://heise.de/-11339525): White House fears that China could gain indirect access to the models via Anthropic's South Korean partner SK Telecom.

That is one example of a dynamic we observe — and, in our view, one that reveals something fundamental: whoever controls the infrastructure controls access.

That is exactly where Europe is exposed. Not for lack of talent. Not for lack of technology. The vulnerability is dependency — on platforms that make decisions elsewhere; on compute capacity you do not control; on rules imposed from outside.

This changes what organizations here should actually be doing. The focus is not on which technology you deploy. The focus is on whether your teams can integrate AI productively into their day-to-day work at all. That is the decisive difference.

Running tests — a chatbot here, a prompt experiment there — does not build process understanding. But a team that has genuinely understood a system can optimize it. Can adapt it to their own reality. Can keep working with it when the technology shifts, because their capability lives in the understanding, not in the tool.

AI competency is becoming a question of economic resilience. Europe's opportunity lies primarily in three areas:

- **Operational fluency** — your teams know how to embed AI in their processes without losing control. - **Broad-based literacy** — not just technical: leaders who understand what is possible; specialists who know what is worth integrating. - **Organizational adaptability** — the capacity to learn fast, standardize processes, and recognize dependencies before they become constraints.

The companies that will weather the next directive — whatever form it takes — are not the ones with the most advanced tools. They are the ones whose people understand why the tools work, what they replace, and what they can never replace. That understanding cannot be switched off from Washington or Beijing or anywhere else.

The real opportunity is not on the political stage. It is inside your organizations — and in the capacity to become more self-determined.