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For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic’s latest feud with the US government, here’s a recap: In April the company said it had built an AI model called Mythos that was so good at working with code it could pose a global cybersecurity threat. Anthropic gave access to a small group of cybersecurity experts so they could see what they were up against. Then it released a modified version called Fable which it said was safer to the public on Tuesday, June 9. That Friday, the federal government told the company it was a threat to national security and placed export controls on the new release. Anthropic revoked access to both models hours later.

People worried about catastrophic effects of AI—broadly labeled “doomers”—have said for years that the technology poses a threat to humanity and published proposals for how the government should intervene in its development. The doomers just got their government intervention—not over a bioweapon or rogue AI, but in response to an AI model that’s basically just really good at coding. And the result so far looks less like a safety plan than like a superficial reaction.

There’s plenty to dissect about what happened in those few days that led to such drastic action from the government, and it’s notable that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was the one who told government officials that Fable would be dangerous (Amazon is both invested in Anthropic and building its own competing AI models). It's also possible this will be a short-lived ban from the government that doesn’t survive legal scrutiny (it’s not clear that Anthropic’s offering access to Fable really counts as “exporting” it, for example).

For one, this is making a whole lot of people not want to rely on American AI companies. TheFrench politician Bruno Retailleau described it as a “wake-up call” that should motivate Europe to build more AI. But any vision of turning Paris into Silicon Valley—touted by many other European leaders following the shutdown of Anthropic’s models—is complicated by one big thing: China.

Open-source models from China are very capable and incredibly cheap, and they can be downloaded to run on anyone’s servers with no rules or guardrails. (This makes them attractive to companies that don’t want access turned off on the basis of a decision from the White House—but equally attractive to cybercriminals, the type that Anthropic hoped to fend off by building safety guardrails into its models.)