In June 2026, Donald Trump signed an executive order that says one very simple and very brutal thing... AI has become a major national security issue. A few days later, Anthropic was banned from giving foreign users access to its most advanced models, and when I say "foreign" that means you, me, French companies, European researchers, everyone except the United States. Overnight, a tool that had become indispensable for research, industry and cybersecurity stopped working for customers who relied on it daily.
Asma Mhalla, a political scientist and visiting researcher at NYU, analyzed this in Le Figaro with a clarity I find remarkable. She starts by using an expression that comes from the military world, and one that really struck me... "conscious inertia." Meaning you see the wall, you know there is a wall, but you decide anyway to keep heading toward it. And when I read that, I tell myself it is exactly what many French companies are doing with their AI dependence... they see the wall, they know it is there, but they keep driving toward it.
"The question is therefore profoundly geopolitical. The Anthropic sequence reminds us that the United States can, unilaterally, decide to restrict access to capabilities that have become essential for research, industry, cybersecurity or defense."
And Mhalla continues, almost like a history professor unfolding the thread... in 2019, the Health Data Hub chose Microsoft to host French health data. In 2020, during Covid, the big technology platforms became the indispensable operators of economic continuity, what Naomi Klein called the "Screen New Deal." Then TikTok, then Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter, then semiconductors, then the cloud, then generative AI... and each time the same scene plays out... as long as interests converge, dependence stays invisible, it is when interests diverge that it becomes a power struggle.
Big Tech and Big State: the rebalancing
What Mhalla describes is a rebalancing of the power dynamic between Big Tech and what she calls "Big State," meaning the American state. Washington is reminding everyone of a rule that did not need to be written down... when a technology becomes strategic, the state takes back control. And the executive order of June 2, 2026 marks a tipping point, because until now the United States mobilized its technological advantage mostly on the industrial front, through control of semiconductors... and well, here, control shifts toward the models themselves, toward capabilities of production, analysis and organization of knowledge. A new capacitary geopolitics is emerging before our eyes, as she says, where industrial, technological, military and cognitive stakes overlap.
And there, Mhalla says something I find fundamental... the real subject is not Anthropic. The real subject is understanding to what extent Europe accepts seeing its strategic capabilities depend on decisions made in Washington. It is a question that should keep every CIO, every CFO and every business leader in Europe awake at night... because the answer, today, is "almost entirely."
Sovereignty as a service: sovereignty as negotiation
Mhalla also talks about something rather fascinating... the Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, know they have neither the best AI models nor the most advanced semiconductors. And well, they built a strategy that consists in becoming unavoidable on certain links of the chain... they exchange strategic resources, land, energy, for influence. That is what she calls "sovereignty as a service," sovereignty as a service, meaning sovereignty as the capacity to negotiate within global value chains.
And it makes me think, because the best negotiating position is when you can do without... now an open source model, installed on an on-premise server, in your building, with your data, cannot be cut off by an executive order in Washington. It cannot see its price multiplied by ten because a supplier decides to flex its muscles. It cannot be used as geopolitical leverage. The most concrete sovereignty that exists is running your models on your machines.
Sovereignty starts with the server in the basement
We talk a lot about digital sovereignty in France, there are reports, calls for tenders for gigafactories, consortia of companies coming together... but most of the time, the conversation stays abstract. "Sovereignty" as a slogan, as a keyword in a PowerPoint presentation, as a line in a press release. And well, the most concrete sovereignty I know is an open source model served by Ollama, running on a server in your company's basement, with your data that never leaves your network.
I really specialized in this, and I will tell you why... it is because it is the only technical answer to a geopolitical problem. Executive orders, reports, press releases, they are necessary, but they do not run a language model. A server, it runs, whether there is an executive order or not, whether there is a report or not, whether there is a press release or not. And that is why I think sovereignty starts with the server in the basement, and not with the press release.
If the Anthropic sequence has made you think about your company's dependence, and well, maybe now is the time to talk about it concretely.