Anthropic's Model Suspension, Europe 2031, and G7 World Leaders Lunching with Frontier AI Lab & Tech CEOs: The Week in Tech & Trust with Yours Truly (EP 29)

🎙️ solo episode with host Eva Simone LihotzkyAnthropic's frontier AI model was pulled offline for every non-American in three days, and suddenly Europe's AI access looked less like something it owns and more like a permission. This is a week where digital trust stopped being abstract: one US export directive, one warning about Europe's compute future, and one lunch table where the people who build AI sat with the people who govern it. For any leader applying AI inside an organisation, it is a week worth understanding in practice, not as headlines.🧭 In this episodeIn a single week of June 2026, three events landed that most coverage treated as separate. Eva reads them as one thread. The US Commerce Department forced Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models offline for any foreign national. The Europe 2031 agenda argued that Europe's window to matter in AI is closing faster than its own authors had predicted. And for the first time, Frontier AI lab CEOs sat at the G7 heads-of-state table. The question underneath all three: when access to the most strategic technology of the moment sits on someone else's permission, what does a European organisation actually own? Eva works through what this means for vendor dependency, infrastructure design, and the difference between treating AI sovereignty as a compute problem and treating it as a trust problem.🔍 Key themesWhy "access" to a frontier AI model may be a permission that someone else can withdraw — and what that does to a strategy built on itThe gap between Europe's AI story as a capital problem and the trust assumption sitting underneath itWhat changes for a leader when vendor lock-in stops being a risk slide and becomes a live eventWhether building infrastructure and orchestration across many models is now resilience rather than over-engineeringWhen the builders of AI also shape the rules that govern it, who represents the people using it🎙️ About the hostEva Simone Lihotzky, AI adoption and ethics advisor, formerly MD in one of the largest independent agency groups in Europe and co-author of 10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly. She has spent more than a decade leading AI implementation inside organisations, which is why this episode resists the easy reads — it stays with the gray zone between hypocrisy and conviction, between capital and trust, rather than resolving it. This is a solo reflection: Eva connecting three news events into one question she openly admits is hard to narrow down.⏱️ Chapters[00:00] Three news items, one thread[02:22] A frontier model offline in three days[08:00] Europe 2031: the window that closed early[11:30] Mistral, and the scale of the gap[18:45] The G7 table: builders meet the people who govern them[25:10] Who represents the ones using the technology🔗 LinksEva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/Europe 2031 agenda — https://europe2031.ai10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly — https://www.10moralquestions.com/the-bookEva's World Economic Forum reflection, January 2026 — The politics of tech on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1RKtxdJWXcQH8vnpnDtgEP?si=wrln7peeSkKb-gotGHYMRgEva's World Economic Forum reflection, January 2026 — The politics of tech on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-in-between-tech-and-trust-podcast/id1828521905?l=en-GB&i=1000747143762Anthropic statement on the Fable / Mythos suspension — https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access