This US administration (or any admin) would almost certainly impose export controls on US AI technology before it would allow one of the frontier model providers to be acquired/relocate outside the US. It did the same thing when ASML wanted to acquire Cymer (California company that provides the EUV light source technology). The acquisition was only allowed under strict technology sharing/export agreements with the Dutch government.

Europe really just needs to rally behind Mistral. That's where they should dump their cash.

Can they actually prevent it though? In typical cases there would be IP licenses involved. But in this case it's a valuation based (AFAICT) on a team of people plus their infra. What happens if they all just happened to get hired by "AnthropicEU GmbH" a new entity which has been gifted hundreds of millions in computing resources?

Having one „champion“ is flawed European approach. We need local competition and headhunting to make it fly.

Hard to compete in an environment that’s anti-996 and the pay is so much less.

Do you consider high working hours to be a benefit akin to higher pay? I think fewer hours and less money is a fair deal for employees.

Fair deal for the employees but hard to compete against smart, well resourced people who are working 996. Everything with AI is moving so fast that moving slower makes you irrelevant.

But can they restrict the researchers from leaving? What if they are just offered regular jobs by a new European company? What the US has done is dictatorial, but this would be even worse if they try to do it.

I'm not sure goals are totally aligned though. The current models are created by enormous expense. We know that many stages are done incorrectly. I am confident that they can be replicated without any unique US knowledge.

At the moment my impression is instead that the issue is computational resources. It's important to stay near the frontier though, and to build up ones capacity to train large models.

Consequently I don't think we need Anthropic. It wouldn't be terrible if they came. Especially if they picked a nice location. Barcelona would be very nice, for example.

There is no capital in the EU

It's all tied up in real estate and horribly inefficient savings accounts.

Given what Amodei thinks of spying non-US citizens, that's a hard pass from me. If you are that loyal (servile) to your country leaders, don't go elsewhere when you "discover" they are thugs. Put up with it or revolt (as Iranians are being asked to do).