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Welcome to Sunday CET and happy mid-summer!

Today - Europe is building an open source 400B+ model but will that be enough for our Ai independence? Let’s have a look.

Enjoy,
Dragos

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One sells emotion and engagement and the other what it means for you and what to do about it.

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European social media was up in arms last weekend as the US administration restricted Anthropic’s latest model, Fable, to non-American citizens.

What actually happened - Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Dario Amodei declaring Fable 5 and Mythos 5 subject to export controls for any location outside the US, and for all foreign nationals inside the US. The trigger was a security concern raised in conversations between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and US officials over a possible jailbreak. Unable to verify nationality inside shared cloud infrastructure, Anthropic disabled both models worldwide.

The whole event looked like noise more than anything else but given the past two years’ macro development it led to many emotional arguments - access was disabled for two specific models, not for Anthropic’s broader service. The move looks less like a targeted action against Europe and more like a governance response to a perceived security issue in a cross-border deployment environment.

What it did expose, regardless of intent, is a systemic risk: overreliance on a handful of dominant models. That makes much of the European reaction performative in the immediate term, but contributed to existing momentum behind the tech-sovereignty agenda and the AI Act.

And fits the timeline too - the Commission published its Tech Sovereignty Package on June 3. Fable 5 was shut down on June 12. On June 19, the Commission named the winner of its Frontier AI Grand Challenge: the EUROPA consortium, led by Italian company Domyn, tasked with building an open-source model spanning all 24 official EU languages at over 400 billion parameters, using modular Mixture-of-Experts architecture. Eligibility was strict - EU-established, under EU control, a track record in large-scale AI, and AI Act commitment.

Domyn looks like a good pick on paper - founded in 2016, valued at €1.7B last year, already ships a 260B-parameter reasoning model through Microsoft Foundry, and is building AI gigafactories across Italy, claimed as Europe's largest supercomputer, with NVIDIA and G42 as part of a $10B three-year plan.

G42 is the Abu Dhabi sovereign tech giant and sits behind a project explicitly framed as European sovereignty - make what you will with it.

More importantly - the project is representative of what can be done, which is not the same as what everyone wants done. Domyn is a sovereign-deployment and vertical-model company, not a frontier lab. And don’t get me wrong, a sovereign 24-language open model is real value and could surprise people - it lets governments, public institutions and SMEs cut routine dependence on the American providers.

However, a vertical-focused, multilingual open-source model doesn't resolve the core vulnerability the Fable episode exposed. A 400B+ MoE model trained on a serious compute base is an execution bet against the best-funded labs in the world, run under rules that selected for eligibility and deliverability i.e EU-established, EU-controlled, AI Act-aligned - not for frontier parity.

The distinction matters and will make a difference if you compete at the high end and your best model goes dark. We’ve gotten a structural dependence on frontier AI capability - question is how quickly, or whether at all, Europe can close that gap.

We have screened 161 fundraising deals closed in Europe in the past seven days.

We archive/transform deal-related data into an easy-searchable intelligent asset at N9, and email a selection of the interesting ones to our customers every week.

Ⓐ+  🇬🇧 ​Conduct AI​ - automated SAAS for ERP migrations
Ⓐ+  🇬🇧 ​Odyssey ML​ - developer of general-purpose models for physical reality
Ⓐ  🇫🇷 ​Waniwani​ - custom SAAS that helps financial companies sell their products directly inside ChatGPT 
Ⓐ  🇩🇪 ​Causa Prima​ - agent-to-agent network for finance operations 
Ⓐ  🇧🇪 ​Warren​ - alt pension and B2B employees benefits 

We have started grading the weekly investment deals based on a proprietary AI algo trained to answer 'does this deal matter, and why?'. 

More graded deals here - by country, sector or investor.

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So much noise out there, below a few stories that caught my attention this week:

Netherlands

France

UK

Germany

Spain

Ireland

Ukraine

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Created every Sunday by @drnovac of Nordic 9 with weekly notes and observations from the European startup ecosystem.

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