Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

ben_w

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

raverbashing

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)

WhatsName

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.

shevy-java

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

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.

delichon

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.

afavour

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.

general1465

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?

procgen

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

testfrequency

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.

khurs

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.

int32_64

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

agilob

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

impossiblefork

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.

PeterStuer

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

killercup

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.

based2

AWS already hosts a few Anthropic models in EU datacenters.

jabedude

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

khurs

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.