The future of chipmaking and Anthropic’s clash with the government

ASML’s newest lithography system is massive: about the size of a double-decker bus, weighing more than 150 tons and costing $400 million. If you want to make the world’s most powerful chips, a machine like this is essential to the process. The system patterns chip features with extreme-ultraviolet light (EUV), radiation outside the visible spectrum.

That light is produced by shooting lasers at tiny molten drops of tin tens of thousands of times a second. ASML now makes about 90% of all chip-lithography tools worldwide, a dominance that has made some people and governments uneasy. Would-be competitors are pushing into its territory as concerns about that market position grow.

In a separate development, Anthropic said it had built an AI model called Mythos that could pose a cybersecurity risk and released a safer version called Fable. Days later, the US government placed export controls on the models, and Anthropic revoked access to both within hours.

United States

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