On the evening of 12 June, a single letter from Washington forced Anthropic to switch off its two most capable AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for every customer on Earth within hours. This week, David Richards MBE makes the case that we have just watched the opening move of a new cold war, an arms race fought not over uranium but over access to the machines that now do our thinking.

The episode traces it from that letter to the banks in Hong Kong quietly cutting their own staff off from Claude, to the question it leaves on Britain's desk: what happens to a London office, a bank or a defence contractor that runs on infrastructure someone else can switch off overnight, and the three things Whitehall must do now.

Also in this episode: the enterprise playbook for surviving a sudden API shutdown, the AI now standing between footballers and the mob at the World Cup, what it means that half of London's jobs are exposed to AI, and the week's Tech and AI Layoff Tracker, where Oracle alone has cut 30,000 roles.

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Keywords:

AI cold war, AI export controls, Anthropic, Fable 5, Mythos 5, Howard Lutnick, deemed export, open-weights AI, AI sovereignty, vendor lock-in, enterprise AI, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Hong Kong, splinternet, UK AI policy, sovereign compute, AI and jobs, London jobs AI, layoffs, Oracle layoffs, FIFA AI moderation, World Cup 2026, The Sunday Signal, David Richards