🔴 Embargo on Intelligence

This week, I had planned to write about another subject, Mistral, to be honest with you, but the news convinced me to keep that newsletter for later.

First because it reinforces what we wrote in the previous newsletter, but also because we are going to offer a very different reading.

Because what we are seeing with the disconnection of Fable 5 is not a kill switch. It is a geographic cognitive divide.

All of Anthropic's other models are still there, including Opus 4.8, as are OpenAI's and, obviously, the Chinese models.

What is being taken away from Europe and the rest of the world is only frontier intelligence.

The message is clear: we have entered the era of America First superintelligence, or, should I say, America Only.

Because, as we will see, there were several ways to "punish" Anthropic. But the means chosen, export control, was both the fastest to implement and the one that required the least justification. All it took was invoking national security.

Not having access to the best frontier model is a catastrophe for European industry: pharma, banking, services, but also the software industry, which is probably the one that benefits most from Fable 5.

Even if the Chinese open source models are getting close, their tools and their environment are not yet turnkey.

The politicians' reaction shows that they still have not understood what is at stake. That is serious, but it is another conversation.

What is happening is as if they stopped selling us premium gasoline or jet fuel, while continuing to supply us with regular gas and diesel. We could still drive cars and fly some planes, but no longer with the same performance or for the same uses. And even then, the image is imperfect for France, which has its own refineries for oil, but nothing equivalent in AI.

Because what Anthropic's Fable 5 had let us glimpse is what I was already calling, in a previous newsletter, level 3: it is no longer just about helping with the intermediate work. From existing documents or a short brief, you can let the machine take over and directly produce a finished result.

A break that makes the forced return to Opus 4.8 hard to accept. A form of demotion that many of us have felt.

Like many, the June 22 deadline, the expiration date of Fable 5 in Max subscriptions, had pushed me to do as much as possible with this model. Seeing six months of scattered work reorganized in a few minutes gave the feeling of changing scale.

For me, AI is a cognitive pulley. It does not do the work for me, but it multiplies what I can do with it.

But, as the Americans say, "we always lived on borrowed time."

Before talking about what we can do and the glimmers of hope on the horizon, we are going to try to understand what happened. Like many, I watched the film unfold, but I also talked with several friends in finance and tech, between France, Asia and the United States. It confirms my intuition a little more.

We recently welcomed a wave of new subscribers, and I have had the opportunity, on several occasions, to talk with some of our subscribers and members at recent events.

I will take this opportunity to tell you that I will be at VivaTech, for the first time in ten years, yes, I know, to talk about AI. I would be delighted to see you there.

https://vivatech.com/sessions/session/c550b51e-5f65-f111-8fcb-6045bd954326

For those who are not yet members, I can only invite you to join us.

This digital transition is both the most intriguing and the most violent we have had the chance to live through. With our members, the goal is to navigate this digital age of uncertainty and find our own voice.

Every newsletter has its interest, but some touch you differently and allow you to make other decisions, for yourself or for your business.

I think this one is among them.

We now live in a world where descriptive talk is everywhere. I try to bring back into public debate a deep reflection, one that relies not only on what one has read or heard, but also on lived experience, my own experience and, obviously, my networks.

Because I am once again working on an AI-related project, I am talking to a lot of people at the moment.

By coincidence of the calendar, when SpaceX's new board was revealed, somewhat at the last minute, I realized that three of its members were part of the networks I frequented in Silicon Valley.

The same goes for the current administration: some of the people I met are today directly or indirectly connected to the decisions taken this week.

A fairly clear narrative arc is beginning to emerge.

The unprecedented success of SpaceX's IPO, the Fable cutoff and a historic demand for liquidity to invest in IPOs show that the world of innovation can no longer look like what it once was.

As a reminder, Amazon's IPO raised only $54 million.

The competition to become the leader of the next stage is fierce. So I am not totally surprised that Fable was cut off by the Trump administration. I am, however, surprised by the brutality of the process.

And then the idea of sabotaging an American company that generates almost $100 billion in revenue seems almost crazy in the land of capitalism.

That is what we are going to discuss with paying members.

Join us here.