After Anthropic outage: Half of firms lack a plan B

5 min read

For two weeks in June, German companies could not use Anthropic’s most powerful models; everything connected to them through the API ground to a halt. The ifo Institute then asked around 5,600 companies what they intended to do about it. Their answer: they know they are dependent; four in ten of those who recognise the risk still plan no countermeasures.

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What is digital dependence? The ifo Institute defines it as the extent to which operations, data and AI use are tied to providers whose location and governing law lie beyond a company’s control. It is measured through self-assessments by around 5,600 businesses in the ifo business survey panel, rather than an inventory of their contracts.

Two weeks without a model

On 12 June 2026, the US government ordered access to Anthropic’s most powerful models to be blocked for foreign nationals, both inside and outside the United States. Anthropic is based in San Francisco and subject to US law. The company did not apply the order selectively: it shut down the affected models for all customers worldwide, including German Mittelstand businesses using the API to generate sales proposals or run customer service.

The outage lasted two weeks; there was no incident notice and no contact person at Anthropic. On 30 June, the US Department of Commerce lifted the export controls. Fable 5, the Claude model for business customers, has been available worldwide again since 1 July. The more powerful Mythos 5, available only to selected organisations anyway, remained restricted to US companies. The ifo Institute used the incident to introduce a special question in its July business surveys. Clemens Fuest, Jonas Hennrich and Klaus Wohlrabe published their analysis on 11 August under the title “Dependent, yet relaxed?”.

Wohlrabe: Businesses know where they stand

Around 5,600 companies in the ifo business survey panel responded, ranging from construction firms to advertising agencies. Almost 88 percent use digital products from US providers, from cloud services and office software to language models. Almost a third place themselves in the top two categories on a five-point scale, describing their dependence as high.

Klaus Wohlrabe, who heads the ifo surveys, sums up the findings: businesses know fairly precisely where they stand but take little action as a result. He cites the cost of risk mitigation as a reason. It remains unclear whether suppliers and customers would support such an investment. Those who can no longer imagine their working day without US software are less likely to regard the situation as an emergency.

The table shows how much this varies: advertising is the most dependent sector, construction the least. Even where dependence is high, only half of users consider it very risky.

Four in ten concerned firms plan no action

Just over 3,000 businesses consider their dependence at least somewhat risky. Ifo asked them about their countermeasures. Four in ten plan none; the rest are spread across the measures in the table. Across all respondents, this means just over one in five companies considers its situation risky and does nothing.

One group stands out. Among IT service providers, only just over one in five plans to do nothing; almost half are looking for European alternatives. IT service providers know the gaps in the market because customers ask about them; businesses that simply use the products put off the question.

Ifo itself warns against underestimating this dependence. A business using no US software at all is barely conceivable in practice. Just over one in nine businesses says it uses no US products; the authors regard this as more likely a misjudgement than a reliable figure.

Fuest: The willingness is there, the supply is missing

Ifo President Clemens Fuest draws a conclusion from the figures that goes beyond individual companies. The willingness to switch exists, he says, but the supply is lacking. He means data centres and cloud platforms in Europe. There is no ready-made product list. According to the surveys cited by the institute, the European Union accounts for less than five percent of recorded global AI computing capacity. A managing director who lists “Europe” as a countermeasure is expressing demand for which few providers yet exist.

Fuest therefore calls for faster approvals for data centres and energy infrastructure, taking months rather than years. The government should make purchase commitments, he argues, because fragmented private demand alone cannot provide the planning certainty needed for new capacity. This is industrial location policy with a horizon of years. An existing SaaS contract with automatic renewal expires in months.

What remains unanswered

The survey names no products. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Anthropic appear in none of the tables. The 34 percent willing to switch reveal nothing about which system a business would replace first.

It remains unclear which contract will be replaced first at the next automatic renewal, and whether a European provider will then secure the contract with a price and trial access. The June incident is over, but authority over access remains unchanged: a model shut down from Washington can be shut down from there again, perhaps a different model from a different provider next time.

Frequently asked questions

Image source: AI-generated (September 2026)

Translated from the German original using artificial intelligence. The German version is authoritative.