Anthropic said it had no practical way to distinguish foreign nationals from U.S. citizens in real-time across all users . Since the directive applied to "any foreign national" and the company couldn't reliably enforce nationality-based access, Anthropic chose to disable both models for all customers globally — not just foreign nationals
. An Anthropic spokesperson said, "The net effect is we must remove access for all our customers"
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Key details:
At the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, on June 17, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined a closed-door working lunch with leaders and other top AI executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. He urged G7 leaders not to splinter over building advanced AI tools and, alongside Hassabis, called for a U.S.-led coalition to set international AI standards and regulations .
According to reports from the Financial Times, CNBC, and Bloomberg Law, Amodei told leaders to "resist the temptation to splinter" on advanced AI . He specifically warned about what he called China's "open-source threat" and argued for a unified Western approach rather than a fragmented one
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman separately proposed an international testing forum at the same session . No binding commitments emerged from the meeting
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European leaders pushed back against the U.S. move, demanding what they called "AI sovereignty checks" and broader access to frontier models .
Industry reaction was mixed. Some security experts praised the U.S. move as prudent national security policy, while others warned it could accelerate fragmentation of AI development into rival blocs . Anthropic's own statement stressed that the company had complied immediately but described the situation as deeply disruptive to its global operations and customer relationships
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The incident marked a turning point in the geopolitics of artificial intelligence, as the world's wealthiest democracies confronted the reality that the U.S. can, and will, cut off access to frontier AI models on national security grounds — a power that unsettled America's closest allies.
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