After Anthropic ban, US battles 'kill switch' backlash - Marco Rubio — US secretary of state Marco Rubio. Eloisa Lopez/Reuters

US secretary of state Marco Rubio has asked diplomats to push back against talk of a “kill switch” in American technology products following the White House’s short-lived decision to keep foreigners from the US’s most advanced AI models, according to a recent cable.

The talking points, which were circulated worldwide, show how US diplomats are trying to deal with the international backlash from the Trump administration’s efforts to control how and to whom American AI companies release their models.

The White House referred questions to the state department, which in turn pointed to an editorial from US undersecretary of state for economic affairs Jacob Helberg that decried “autarkist measures” which aimed to push American technology aside in favour of native AI solutions, a trend he described as “backward and counterproductive”.

Rubio’s missive follows the Trump administration’s 12 June move to block foreign nationals from Anthropic’s most advanced models, Mythos and Fable, on national security grounds, prompting the AI company to abruptly suspend access to the models globally. Asian tech executives seized on the disruption to tout their own alternatives and European lawmakers redoubled their calls for digital independence from the US.

Although the ban was lifted later the same month, the fallout lingers. Combined with Trump’s 2 June executive order, which asked AI companies to voluntarily submit their models to 30 days of cybersecurity testing ahead of their release, it signalled a new appetite from the US government to police AI companies’ products — and potentially yank them even from the hands of allies at a moment’s notice.

‘Narrative is exaggerated’

European lawmaker Christophe Grudler said the episode showed that “the US holds a real ‘kill-switch’ over essential technologies and that they are more than willing to use it”. Aura Salla, a member of the European People’s Party, the European parliament’s biggest political group, said that the continent “cannot keep building its tech stack on access that can be switched off overnight by a foreign government”.

The state department cable, dated 16 July, did not mention Anthropic by name or refer specifically to last month’s ban or Trump’s executive order, but it provided American diplomats with talking points aimed at countering the arguments that have sprung up in their wake.

Read: China weighs blocking the West from its best AI

“Pausing narrow uses or requiring a 30-day testing window prior to the release of a highly potent new technology is not a ‘kill switch’,” the cable said. “There is no government ‘magic button’. This narrative is exaggerated and doesn’t capture the nuances of US technology policy.”

Rubio’s cable pushed diplomats to fight “so-called digital sovereignty” initiatives, which it defined as efforts to restrict American tech firms’ access to foreign markets, subject them to localisation requirements, charge them “network usage fees” or force them to follow local rules around issues such as content moderation. Rubio had already instructed American diplomats to oppose similar data sovereignty measures earlier this year.

The cable also discussed how to counter “AI sovereignty” arguments, instructing American diplomats to advertise American AI products as the best tools available and describe efforts to build rival AI systems from the ground up as a waste of time and resources.

“American AI companies can build large, independent AI infrastructure, with secure and robust supply chains that minimise backdoor risk,” the cable said. “They build it. It’s yours.”

Edward Fishman, director of the Maurice R Greenberg Center for Geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he sympathised with the safety considerations that prompted the US government to first impose restrictions on Anthropic’s models, which can turbocharge complex hacking operations. But Fishman said the Trump administration’s habit of wielding coercive economic tools such as tariffs and sanctions against friend and foe alike made the state department’s pitch a tough sell.

European partners in particular were concerned that if their businesses became “ultra reliant on US frontier AI models like those made by Anthropic and OpenAI, that the US could use that as an economic weapon against them down the road”, he said.

Salla, the European lawmaker, said the Trump administration’s repeated threats against countries like Denmark had generated an atmosphere of mistrust that no amount of rhetoric could dispel.