Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-28/austria-lobbies-eu-to-host-anthropic-after-us-access-curbs

by root-parent • 24 days ago

116 139 24 days ago

bloomberg.com

ben_w4• 24 days ago

Non-paywalled alternative: https://www.reuters.com/business/austria-lobbies-eu-host-ant...

uxhacker• 24 days ago

Actually I am been asked to pay for Reuters

Edited : this looks like it is in paywalled https://uk.news.yahoo.com/austria-lobbies-eu-host-anthropic-...

raverbashing2• 24 days ago

Interesting country lobbying this. So this is either the OPEC effect or some active measures "another country" to sow division (because I don't think the Austrians were smart enough of think that for themselves)

tomalbrc• 24 days ago

I don't think the Austrians were smart enough of think that for themselves

Leave your fascist remarks out of here

maximilianburke• 24 days ago

Ignorant, yes, but not fascist.

raverbashing2• 24 days ago

So is recognizing the fact that one of the most luddite countries in Europe who can't ask ChatGPT for directions is incapable of thinking forward with AI, is "fascism" now? Cool

WhatsName• 24 days ago

To be honest, as much as people complain about EU regulations and bureaucracy, at least they are highly predictable. Every relevant piece of regulation, like the GDPR and the AI Act, was probably more than five years in the making and then added another year or two to take effect.

If I were a frontier lab with a billion-dollar investment under my belt, I wouldn't want to operate in a regulatory environment with the same prediction horizon as the weather.

SpicyLemonZest5• 24 days ago

They don't go on random personalist whims (so far!), but they also tend to be much less specific in a way that can frustrate US businesses. The GDPR definition of "personal data" is just a couple of lines long; the California definition of "personal information" lists out twelve categories, one of which is "sensitive personal information" with eight more categories.

vrganj5• 24 days ago

There's a fundamentally different definition of how laws are supposed to work. EU law isn't a list of checkboxes that you can technically check while going counter to the spirit, it is a philosophical direction, the details of following it are up to you. The spirit matters, not the letter.

When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...

lostmsu• 24 days ago

5 years in the making AI act?

Y-bar3• 24 days ago

The AI Act Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 was introduced as a proposal on January 6th, 2021, so it took a bit over three years for that specific piece of legislation until it had the final vote in May 2024.

uyzstvqs• 24 days ago

EU regulation is not the problem, it's the national governments. They are the ones who create red tape and high taxation almost every step of the way, and create years of delays when even one crazy person complains.

felipeerias• 24 days ago

Anthropic have raised roughly $100 billion just in the first half of this year. Capital markets in the EU are simply unable to operate at that speed and scale.

general14653• 24 days ago

Capital markets in the EU are simply unable to operate at that speed and scale.

Yeah that's true, getting investment of few million EUR to your company takes years and investors are looking at you like they are giving you their whole national budget. It is comical to the point that businesses rarely seek investments in general in Europe and you just need to grow naturally.

petcat• 24 days ago

as much as people complain about EU regulations and bureaucracy, at least they are highly predictable.

Hasn't the EU basically already regulated any potential "unsafe" AI in Europe out of existence?

shevy-java• 24 days ago

Typical corruption in Austria, coming from the ÖVP.

Alexander Pröll is like Sebastian Kurz here. The ÖVP always wants to have financial interests leak into politics.

cromka• 24 days ago

Good luck with that after they effectively "appropriated" the pirated IP to teach their models and admitted to it. They'd be drowning in lawsuits. At least what I think would happen, IANAL.

delichon2• 24 days ago

To stay near the frontier of AI without being subject to the discretion of foreign countries the EU has to stay near the frontier of R&D themselves. Even if they can get around ITAR now and self-host, they would be stuck with having to repeatedly negotiate permission to use each new advance.

If they do relax regulation (especially on energy generation) sufficiently to unleash the continent's big brained boffins and entrepreneurs on AI, they could quickly develop their own advances that would give them real leverage.

dgellow4• 24 days ago

What specific regulations are currently blocking AI entrepreneurs?

impossiblefork10• 24 days ago

There may be an advantage to be able to use all available data.

Chu4eeno3• 24 days ago

Money, data, electricity, at least? In addition to the AI-specific laws.

alephnerd3• 24 days ago

If they do relax regulation (especially on energy generation) sufficiently to unleash the continent's big brained boffins and entrepreneurs on AI

Capital. Capital, capital, capital.

The EU is still not a single unified economy and capital markets remains semi-sovereign.

Every Euro that goes out of (eg.) a Dutch taxpayer's pocket into an (eg.) German domiciled competitor gets pushed back against by national competitors as well as by the government.

You see this with French and German rivalry against Scaleway+OVHCloud versus Hetzner (edited because of early morning brain snafus) to Dassault versus Airbus.

But the issue is, a single unified capital market that overrides national sovereignty also leaves vast swathes of European voters at risk of unemployment via capital flight. You saw this with East Germany's shift towards the AfD following industry's shift to Poland.

So neither industry nor national governments (who remain the overriding power of the EU) have an incentive for a single unified market, and actually remain incentivized to work with outside partners instead.

dgellow4• 24 days ago

I really hope that will push for completion of the single market. I wouldn’t bet on it, but that’s something we should have done a decade ago

blfr• 24 days ago

Both Scaleway and OVH are French and partly made possible by France's inexpensive energy mix.

doctorpangloss• 24 days ago

Okay. Lemme ask you a simple question: why does Dario Amodei live in the United States? Why do his parents live here? What happened?

It's not the first time in recent history frontier technology has been developed and commercialized, before any of this "capital" you are talking about really existed. That's the easy part (print money). The hard part is, taking leadership to convince the citizens of a place to be... what? Do you know?

re-framer4• 24 days ago

What is it that makes gas power plants so much more attractive than renewable energy? From what I heard, it's a bit easier to build them very fast and they reliably produce energy on demand (as long as gas is available of course). But I imaging one could replicate this using solar/wind and storage units.

I could imagine that the challenge is that that having enough solar panels for a few gigawatts of consumption is hard to do on-site, so one needs to connect the data center to the grid, which, in turn, complicates matters and transformators are scarce right now.

Is this about right? I do hope that we find a way to do this more sustainably. AI doesn't solve climate change in the next few years, so clean energy isn't irrelevant.

dipierro• 24 days ago

As far as I understand, building a large solar farm is still considerably _faster_ than gas turbine plant.

throe9393i44i2• 24 days ago

It is hard to operate renewables 24/7. At night and winter, you need a big array of generators and LED lights to shine on solars. Very inefficient.

Or for every solar you need a generator as a backup!

dcrazy4• 24 days ago

My understanding is that you can turn gas plants on and off very quickly, and they can run at any time of day. That makes them excellent suppliers for peak demand. For much of the year, the evening peak occurs when the sun is not shining and the winds have died down, so renewables are not viable.

legulere• 24 days ago

You can build gas power plants on site at your data center and don’t have to wait for the grid to be upgraded. In the long run gas will be replaced by cheaper renewables

irthomasthomas2• 24 days ago

Very fast and reliable? Sold!

cyanydeez• 24 days ago

Or they can just wait for disease and famine, along with Israel and Russia, to destroy America from the inside. Or just get their fusion projects working.

erwald4• 24 days ago

I don't think ITAR has anything to do with any of this.

delichon2• 24 days ago

The export control directives on Anthropic are under the authority of the Arms Export Control Act. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) implement the AECA for commercial exports, including the "technical data" under control. This story is about circumventing ITAR directives.

convolvatron• 24 days ago

or, we could just wait a hot second, get GPU and associated hardware over the 30% utilization mark, develop a fault tolerance strategy that recovers more useful work, and spend a bit more time researching how models actually converge. 50% savings on training time would mean even more energy savings because of the add-on effects of cooling.

this spending of billions just to get a 4 month lead, without even trying to invest in getting this stuff to run properly is wasteful to the point of insanity. I don't think it's at all productive to chide people for not wanting to dump their resources into a black hole.

it seems pretty clear that the investors and the AI companies _like_ to throw around big GW numbers. it gives them a moat, and it fuels the bubble.

afavour• 24 days ago

Interesting thought. But the Trump administration is absolutely vindictive enough that they’d put some kind of import restriction on Anthropic as punishment if they left the US and they won’t want to lose the US market, as much as the current situation works against them.

SpicyLemonZest5• 24 days ago

I couldn't dislike the Trump administration more, but I think even the kindest and least vindictive of countries would not allow a company to relocate overseas to avoid export controls. (I had understood the proposal to be just that Anthropic should set up an EU office.)

anonzzzies• 24 days ago

Anthropic should set up an EU office

I read that from it too, but not sure how it would help as that doesn't stop export controls.

ben_w4• 24 days ago

Indeed, not for the foreseeable future.

Today and in this context, I consider "foreseeable future" to be "up to 2 years".

general14653• 24 days ago

I don't think it would resolve anything. Mythos and similar models are under export protections. So even if you get hardware in EU, how are you going to get past the export protections?

vrganj5• 24 days ago

Once you're no longer in the US, you're no longer bound by their laws.

_aavaa_• 24 days ago

But anthropic is. Hosting the model outside the US doesn’t do anything.

procgen• 24 days ago

Dario is an American patriot who wants the US to win. Don't see this happening.

AussieWog932• 24 days ago

What is the US "winning" by pissing off their allies?

hgoel• 24 days ago

Who needs allies when you can have a digital god to subjugate those allies into proper vassals?

I know this is an insane statement, but I think much of current American foreign policy can be explained by the belief that their technology makes allies unnecessary.

penguin_booze• 24 days ago

Allies? What allies?

halJordan• 24 days ago

Ask yourself the same question, but replace it with France kicking out NATO or New Zealand kicking out the Americans. What did they gain by pissing off their allies, and what have been the honest long term effects for the country in question?

reasonableklout• 24 days ago

They also need compute. The US has more compute than anywhere else, so Anthropic won't be moving until the EU can offer something equivalent.

testfrequency• 24 days ago

I was getting heat for proposing companies do this if they truly care about their mission.

Even if nothing comes of it, it’s a healthy consideration to anyone operating in the US to really think about their goals and what best sets them up for success.

Many other parts of the world do not operate under the same capitalistic mindset that American companies are forced into by pressure of the systems they are beholden to.

khurs6• 24 days ago

Anthropic already have offices across the world, including Europe, but unless they moved their registered address would be subject to the curbs.

If Anthropic quit the USA, Trump administration would likely make an example of them.

Wouldn't be pretty.

dgellow4• 24 days ago

Anthropic engineering is in London and the US. The other offices in Europe are sales oriented

khurs6• 24 days ago

Zurich is also Engineering (any many staff in Zurich and London will be from other countries temporarily working there).

int32_64• 24 days ago

Have OpenAI or Anthropic ever had a model hacked/leaked? Is there any good reads on their cultures of preventing it from happening?

varun_ch• 24 days ago

surely the weights for the model & the equipment to run them make it logistically challenging enough to deter that… also I’m sure models have leaked in their APIs before but those would be pretty easy and quick to catch/fix.

sarjann• 24 days ago

I believe Nvidia chips have a secure way to run your model on other infra.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/solutions/confident...

erwald4• 24 days ago

Confidential computing is not secure against a potential attacker who has physical access to the hardware. The CC security guarantees explicitly assume the attacker has no physical access.

traceroute662• 24 days ago

I believe Nvidia chips have a secure way to run your model on other infra.

Yes. And its already on offer today.

See Tinfoil(US)[1] and Privatemode(Germany)[2]

Tinfoil have not been independently audited, it is somewhere on their long-term radar.

Privatemode have been thoroughly independently audited with documentation available on request.

[1]https://tinfoil.sh/ [2] https://www.privatemode.ai/

grun• 24 days ago

- afaik no openai or anth model weight have been leaked to date

- confidential computing and trusted execution environments (TEEs) are the strongest primitive yet invented to prevent model weight exfiltration. there are other techniques. like bandwidth limiting of GPU workers and key sealing. but none as strong as those afforded by confidential computing and TEEs

- see https://confidential.ai/docs/confidential-computing-primer for a primer on confidential computing

- using confidential computing and TEEs to protect model weights in use is an area of active research

note: i work on confidential.ai

agilob2• 24 days ago

US can simply ban export of AI tools and wieghts like they did with PGP. Austria should start using Mistral or open models.

ben_w4• 24 days ago

Yes, but the highest levels of the US government… are not currently the best and the brightest, so they may well implement a ban after they've been exported or remove a ban in exchange for a shiny golden bauble.

agilob2• 24 days ago

Or start a war for developing own weights /s

impossiblefork10• 24 days ago

I think what's actually needed is two things: an EU training infrastructure that allows training of 10T+ models, and an EU inference infrastructure that is sufficient that it's possible to do RL on them.

This effectively reduces the problem to a specialized supercomputing infrastructure problem which I think is relatively easy to solve. I think the chips are coming. I think Euclyd will be able to do the inference chip and I think the training chip won't be harder. It's just a matter of accepting the need to order a huge number of them, being willing to think a little bit like the kind of people who operate corners. So we can be there next year, I think. What we then lack is a training chip-- maybe OpenChip can do it, maybe they can't, but there are reasonable but still unfinished projects. Maybe if Euclyd finishes an inference chip in 2027 we can have the state pay them to make a training version, put in fp32, put in communication tiles. If their design is real and works (which it should, since it's basically a fancier version of Groq, as it's described, and since even Groq works) I think the advantage these chips is likely to have would be enough that a training version would be NVIDIA-beating.

We probably need some solution for the data-- i.e. to allow people to do things that are against copyright law in a limited way, but I think it's a better idea to start EU firms than to try to attract Anthropic.

Because of the need for capital the hardware-software carousel is necessary. We can't pay for NVIDIA chips and then have NVIDIA feed that money into US firms. We have to feed money into EU chips that either carousel the money into EU AI firms or who just offer cheap chips.

sajithdilshan6• 24 days ago

The big question is who is going to fund it? Is it tax payers money? If so how can they guarantee it’s not going to be another waste and corrupted disaster. Also EU is already late to the AI race and by the time the lawmakers starts to think about this, it would be game over

impossiblefork10• 24 days ago

I think the chips alone are 10B minimum. It'd be way bigger than CERN.

Provided that the systems work, they can at least be repurposed to other things. If the organizations that are to train public LLMs can't do it, we can rent the system out to Mistral or something.

So I think something like 5B, starting with 10B to get started, in public money per year, the chip firms are private, some of the LLM firms will be private, but the system is available to train European LLMs-- that's I think a realistic approach.

sometimelurker5• 24 days ago

The big question is who is going to fund it?

this feels like a small question, the money needed for this isn't that much (probably ~20b) and every country needs cyberwarfare abilities, especially automatable ones, so the military can pay for it. And its not like 10T models cant be used for anything else, so people who want ROI in health, chip development, all sorts of stuff

irthomasthomas2• 24 days ago

GLM 5.2 is ~40B active parameters, which is what matters most for training cost.

impossiblefork10• 24 days ago

Yeah, but if its final performance comes from being trained with data from a bigger model one can question whether it's a way to build genuinely new 40B models.

sometimelurker5• 24 days ago

for RL cost*

pretraining becomes more expensive actually as you make MoE models sparser (you need more tokens in the pretrain, and if you don't have that then you need to train for longer)

sometimelurker5• 24 days ago

Europe has asml

impossiblefork10• 24 days ago

Yes, but what does that affect?

If we end up with a world where only US firms can use the latest LLMs and the latest LLMs are needed to keep up in the software world, or in making prototypes, then that's a whole series of fields which are blocked from us.

So I think we need to make sure that we no only can, but build frontier LLMs from scratch-- not RLed on foreign data, but genuinely from scratch.

Even from an economic point of view, I don't think a continuous outflow of ~200 USD/month for every office job is sustainable, and that's what we'd get if the plausible scenario is borne out. An inter-EU cost of 200 USD/month for every office job though, that's survivable.

dadoum2• 24 days ago

VSORA already finished their inference chip if you want to take a look at what they're doing. They got a handful produced at TSMC 5nm node. They are expected to be offered by Scaleway at some point in the near future (alongside with other French components from the AION consortium, like a SiPearl Rhea1 CPU and an Eviden Bull BXIv3 interconnect, all of them are also already produced, only integration is remaining). It will still probably take some more time though, as the AI stack needs to be finalized (ZML), but I am surprised that those developments are not being much discussed.

impossiblefork10• 24 days ago

Ah, yes. That's good too. Especially VSORA and the interconnect, and I guess the CPU is needed too. I guess what remains is the training chip and OpenChip will be the first.

PeterStuer• 24 days ago

So how do these people propose to protect all involved after they defy CFIUS?

killercup• 24 days ago

Is this the way forward for the EU? Genuinely curious: Are there any EU providers that host the very good recent Chinese open weight models? Like, an EU-based alternative to DeepSeek's own API offering? To me, that sounds like an easier business to turn profitable, albeit maybe less impressive.

tancop• 24 days ago

nextbit in spain is hosting deepseek but its the most expensive provider on openrouter. inceptron in sweden for glm and nebius in the netherlands hosting smaller models like nemotron. mistral hosting their own models obviously. its not a big market.

the problem is big chunks of europe have expensive power and insane red tape for building data centers (or anything else really). i think france is the best option with cheap nuclear but its years before any large buildout can even start.

Chu4eeno3• 24 days ago

Is it only Norway that has abundant, cheap and renewable hydro-power?

based2• 24 days ago

AWS already hosts a few Anthropic models in EU datacenters.

jabedude• 24 days ago

Reminds me of some of the scenarios from https://europe2031.ai.

hoppp• 24 days ago

I support

khurs6• 24 days ago

Here is a solution:

Trump forced all European countries to increase their defence budgets, And as AI is both a offensive and defensive tool, it can be argued that a chunk of this defence budget can be spent on AI R&D.

zarzavat• 24 days ago

While I love your eye for malicious compliance I believe that Putin also forced European countries to increase their defence budgets.

zerozerotwo• 24 days ago

Curious how you can develop ai in Europe and still be compliant with eu ai regulations , dma, dsa and gdpr at the same time

3ot• 24 days ago

Not all of those regulations apply to AI training or inference. And having models coming from and provided by Mistral should be good enough of a signal that it is possible. Isn‘t this enough of an answer that it is possible to do it?

dadoum2• 24 days ago

DMA and DSA are very easy to comply with, there is an easy heuristic function to know if your AI startup is affected:

    |_: Company| false

DMA and DSA only applies to companies explicitly designated as gatekeepers according to EU law. There are criteria for that, about scale and market control, but generally you really don't have to worry, you will see that coming from very far.

digitaltrees• 24 days ago

Hosting current gen intelligence is like recruiting rocket scientist with no space program, university system, military purchasing or start up and commercialization ecosystem.

They will get capacity, and that is important, but it will be frozen in time. Without an independent ecosystem the engine will stall.

That being said all of this came out of a single community: YC. OpenAI and scale.com created a training data set collection, annotating and training fly wheel. Tiny little startups did this. But the EU is so afraid of failure that it’s hard to get anyone to try for moonshots

Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

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