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Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs
- ben_w 3mo agoNon-paywalled alternative: https://www.reuters.com/business/austria-lobbies-eu-host-anthropic-ai-after-us-curbs-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-06-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/austria-lobbies-eu-host-ant...
- uxhacker 3mo agoActually 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-125855044.html https://uk.news.yahoo.com/austria-lobbies-eu-host-anthropic-...
- raverbashing 3mo agoInteresting 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 3mo ago> I don't think the Austrians were smart enough of think that for themselves Leave your fascist remarks out of here
- maximilianburke 3mo agoIgnorant, yes, but not fascist.
- raverbashing 3mo agoSo 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 3mo agoTo 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.
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo agoThey 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.
- vrganj 3mo agoThere'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/2017/599364/EPRS_BRI(2017)599364_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
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- shevy-java 3mo agoTypical 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 3mo agoGood 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.
- delichon 3mo agoTo 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.
- dgellow 3mo agoWhat specific regulations are currently blocking AI entrepreneurs?
- impossiblefork 3mo agoThere may be an advantage to be able to use all available data.
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoMoney, data, electricity, at least? In addition to the AI-specific laws.
- alephnerd 3mo 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.
- afavour 3mo agoInteresting 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.
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo agoI 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 3mo 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_w 3mo agoIndeed, not for the foreseeable future. Today and in this context, I consider "foreseeable future" to be "up to 2 years".
- general1465 3mo agoI 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?
- vrganj 3mo agoOnce you're no longer in the US, you're no longer bound by their laws.
- _aavaa_ 3mo agoBut anthropic is. Hosting the model outside the US doesn’t do anything.
- vrganj 3mo agoI think the idea is to host the whole company, physically.
- general1465 3mo agoI don't think that this is a loophole. Anthropic would need to copy the model to the new company in Europe, which would be akin to exporting the model, which is exactly what export restrictions are restricting.
- procgen 3mo agoDario is an American patriot who wants the US to win. Don't see this happening.
- AussieWog93 3mo agoWhat is the US "winning" by pissing off their allies?
- hgoel 3mo agoWho 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 3mo agoAllies? What allies?
- halJordan 3mo agoAsk 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?
- AussieWog93 3mo agoBroadly negative, I'd assume.
- reasonableklout 3mo agoThey 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 3mo agoI 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.
- khurs 3mo agoAnthropic 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.
- dgellow 3mo agoAnthropic engineering is in London and the US. The other offices in Europe are sales oriented
- khurs 3mo agoZurich is also Engineering (any many staff in Zurich and London will be from other countries temporarily working there).
- graemep 3mo agoWhich makes it even more difficult to limit access to Americans. Deepmind was originally a British company and has R & D in multiple countries to it will be even more awkward with them. I have always thought the UK was too liberal in allowing foreign takeovers of key businesses. Arm and Deepmind are great examples of why.
- khurs 3mo agoDeepmind I can undertand, as it was early days and no guarantee of success? and they needed massive investment. But the decision to allow Arm to be sold was surprising. But UK sells nearly everything - we need ongoing foreign investment.
- graemep 3mo ago> Deepmind I can undertand, as it was early days and no guarantee of success? Its companies with no guarantee of success that are the future innovators. Look at how important Deepmind's field has become. > But UK sells nearly everything - we need ongoing foreign investment. and then we complain about the resulting trade deficit! You cannot have both - it literally does not add up.
- int32_64 3mo agoHave OpenAI or Anthropic ever had a model hacked/leaked? Is there any good reads on their cultures of preventing it from happening?
- varun_ch 3mo agosurely 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 3mo agoI believe Nvidia chips have a secure way to run your model on other infra. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/solutions/confidential-computing/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/solutions/confident...
- erwald 3mo agoConfidential 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.
- traceroute66 3mo ago> is not secure against a potential attacker who has physical access to the hardware. Well, yes, its the oldest adage in computing that "physical access == game over". So I would argue it is more about reducing your risk to a more acceptable level. And in that respect I would say using services such as Tinfoil or Privatemode is an enormous step up from "trust me dude, we won't look at your data". Remotely verifiable attestation combined with independent audits of the company hosting is a large step up from a Zero Data Retention clause in your contract that you have no way of verifying is actually happening other than "trust me dude". Clearly I absolutely agree, having it on your own infrastructure is best for confidentiality. But even then, what about evil-maid attacks in the datacentre ? Unless you have your own datacentre, you're going to be in a shared colo facility ...
- agilob 3mo agoUS can simply ban export of AI tools and wieghts like they did with PGP. Austria should start using Mistral or open models.
- ben_w 3mo agoYes, 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.
- impossiblefork 3mo agoI 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.
- sajithdilshan 3mo agoThe 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
- impossiblefork 3mo agoI 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.
- PeterStuer 3mo agoSo how do these people propose to protect all involved after they defy CFIUS?
- killercup 3mo agoIs 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 3mo agonextbit 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.
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoIs it only Norway that has abundant, cheap and renewable hydro-power?
- flowerthoughts 3mo agoNorth of Sweden too, from the same mountains. Switzerland could probably extend their hydro if they wanted to, but it's NIMBY rich. Wind and solar has stalled, though there's plenty of both in the Alps.
- based2 3mo agoAWS already hosts a few Anthropic models in EU datacenters.
- jabedude 3mo agoReminds me of some of the scenarios from https://europe2031.ai https://europe2031.ai.
- hoppp 3mo agoI support
- khurs 3mo agoHere 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 3mo agoWhile I love your eye for malicious compliance I believe that Putin also forced European countries to increase their defence budgets.
- zerozerotwo 3mo agoCurious how you can develop ai in Europe and still be compliant with eu ai regulations , dma, dsa and gdpr at the same time
- 3ot 3mo agoNot 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?
- dadoum 3mo agoDMA 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 3mo agoHosting 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
- protectifyai 3mo ago[flagged]