Dangerous Technology For Americans Only | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

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Dangerous Technology For Americans Only

written on June 13, 2026

There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit<br>by the US government’s export control directive to suspend access to Fable and<br>Mythos. Anthropic and<br>their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own<br>technology as dangerous and in need of strict controls and regulation. Now that<br>the US government appears to have taken that framing seriously and told them to<br>turn it off for foreign nationals I can see why people are making fun of that<br>situation.

I understand the reaction, but I urge you to not entertain it for too long<br>because it is a giant distraction. The important part is not that Anthropic’s<br>safety language came back to bite them but the line the US government is<br>drawing: this technology is apparently so powerful that only Americans should<br>have it.

We are on a clear path towards a world of division. One should think that if a<br>model is too dangerous for everyone, then it is too dangerous for Americans too.<br>Instead the US is treating these models like weapons that need to be controlled.<br>It is not just about capabilities, it is about racism and nationalism. If you<br>have the wrong passport, you are not to be trusted. This is a very different<br>thing from safety, and Europeans should pay close attention to it.

Safety and National Control

The directive, as Anthropic describes it, applies to foreign nationals whether<br>they are inside or outside the United States, including foreign national<br>Anthropic employees. That is an astonishing boundary if you think about it. We<br>moved from "do not sell this model to hostile governments" to nationality itself<br>being the defining boundary. This should be a wake-up call to Europeans in and<br>outside the US, and quite frankly, any non US citizen.

A lot of AI safety discourse presents itself as universal: humanity,<br>catastrophic risk, safeguards, responsible deployment. Even Anthropic’s own<br>writings start out that way, but yet every time regulation is discussed there<br>is an overtone of national security and that it cannot get into the wrong hands.<br>It’s not just Anthropic, it’s the entire US based discourse on AI. The<br>foundation is that the US has moral superiority and others are not to be<br>trusted. That there are other countries are authoritarian, that they lack<br>freedoms.

That should make us uncomfortable, not just Europeans, but particularly us. It<br>is also a situation you cannot regulate yourself out of. European technology<br>policy is entirely unprepared for this, because this is not a question of<br>regulation but a question of might and power, something that Europe lacks.

Europe has spent years trying to regulate large American technology companies,<br>sometimes for good reasons. I am not reflexively against that. The DMA matters<br>because access matters. Users should have agency<br>over their devices, their data, and the software they run. But regulation is a<br>useless substitute for capability and we are lacking that. Regulation might try<br>to force open doors but if those doors only come from American or Chinese<br>companies, then that accomplishes very little.

Also let’s not be naive in that this is a negotiation of money and force. The<br>US is in that position because the US has a mighty military. The US can bomb<br>nations anywhere in the world, force international trade routes closed and get<br>away with it. That’s true leverage.

Oh Europe

Europe is dependent on the United States in ways that are becoming increasingly<br>impossible to ignore. We depend on American cloud providers, operating systems,<br>developer platforms and now AI models and internet from satellites. We also<br>depend on global semiconductor supply chains we do not control. If access to<br>frontier AI becomes a matter of American national security policy, Europe is not<br>a peer in that conversation and might not even be a market.

That is a humiliating position, but one that happened entirely intentionally.

European citizens and politicians still have not managed to move beyond blaming<br>the EU for its failures. We built and maintained fragmented markets and then<br>pretended we had a single one. We let company formation, hiring, equity<br>compensation, tax, notaries, KYC, banking, and cross-border services remain much<br>harder than they need to be and we are playing these rules against each other.<br>Not just on the European level, but within every single member state. We<br>protect the trusts and established enterprises, who are risk averse and<br>entrenched, instead of trusting the next generation to build great companies.<br>We created a culture where process becomes an excuse for low<br>agency. We made it hard to build new and large<br>companies and then act surprised when our most ambitious founders move somewhere<br>else or just decided to incorporate their companies in the...