On 12 June 2026, a US export-control order forced a major model provider to cut off two of its strongest systems for everyone without American citizenship. For nineteen days, European users were left without tools that had long been running in production, with no notice and no grace period. What we take from this is simple: access to the most capable models is now decided as a question of national security, and the user side in Europe has no seat at that table. Two bills in Congress would cement the practice further, one as mandatory testing before release, the other as a shutdown that authorities could order.
For Swiss companies this is no argument against American models, which still lead the field technically. The sensible move is a second track: record the dependency in the risk register, insert a technical intermediate layer so that changing provider stops being a matter of months, and plan open models such as Apertus, created at Swiss universities, as a durable complement.