European companies diversify AI suppliers as US access curbs bite

Limits on access to some US AI services are accelerating efforts by large European companies to spread workloads across multiple providers. The pressure intensified after the US government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. The move exposed a weakness in proprietary AI services delivered remotely: providers can restrict access, and customers cannot independently run the models on their own servers.

Siemens, Renault Group, Orange and ChapsVision said they already use combinations of US, Chinese and European models to avoid dependence on a single supplier. Siemens uses DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Nvidia’s Nemotron alongside other models, while Renault Group works with Google, Microsoft, Mistral, DeepSeek and Dataiku. ChapsVision uses models from Mistral, Anthropic, OpenAI and Qwen, treating sovereignty as the ability to switch to a credible alternative if a service is cut.

European executives framed resilience as diversification rather than isolation. Orange said running open-source models on European infrastructure keeps data under local control, and its chief executive called for AI that Europe can access, govern and challenge on its own terms. Costs are also becoming a concern as agent-based systems increase token usage, prompting companies such as Renault Group to adapt to sharply rising token costs.