This is odd, ETH Zurich is one of the top ML research labs in the world. They routinely work with Disney! Are they going to block Germany and Max Planck Institute as well? (who commonly work with ETH Zurich)
Let's be realistic EU would be dump to think that US under Trump will reliable continue to stay a alley of the EU (which doesn't mean they become a foe, either, reality is more complex then a dump black and white world few a lot of fictional stories love to have).
Meta, OpenAI and similar have made it through their action very clear that they:
- Want to abuse legislation to make sure no future competition can rise to rival them (When it comes to foundational models, close to all AI startups use fundational models from tech startups even if they speak of "having their own model" (which nearly always is just a minimal domain adaption of a foundation model from a US tech giant). OpenAI was very well open okay, or lets better say visible, about that
- Are not okay and will penalize any country with legislation which states you can't just train on copyrighted content without getting a license which allows training (i.e. it's not fair use, which it theoretically shouldn't be either in the US as it's in general trying to replace the people of which content they train on). E.g. various "open source" models from Meta aren't available in the EU and that was before export restrictions.
- Both have no access to influence US government decisions, so removing access from a Uni or even Country which tries to create their own foundation models. Which much less legal copyright issues. Is just kind of the natural consequence of giving tech giants which try to make sure they stay quasi monopolies to much governmental influence.
So I think if the US wouldn't be worried of EU then teaming up with China for ML compute ships the EU might already have been on the "reduced access" list. Or at least some key EU states which have understood how important it is to have a non US foundational model.
Through also to be fair Swiss "neutrality" is complex, and involves having decent political and trade relationships which any super power as far as relevant for them and viable (e.g. not really Russia anymore). Which includes China. This didn't prevent them to criticize China e.g. about Honkong but they are in discussions to improve trade agreements between them and China since last year (see Wikipedia).
So my guess is the main reason is to put pressure on Swiss wrt. future "improvements" of trade agreements with China.
But I think the points listed first still are something the EU has to highly worry about and they might have very well played a secondary role for this decision. You know like testing out the waters how exuding alleys from free chip access will be treated by other alleys.
"EU would be dump to think that US under Trump will reliable continue to stay a alley of the EU (which doesn't mean they become a foe, either"
Threatening with violence (over greenland) is something enemeys do. Not partners. Especially since denmark considered himself a close ally to the US. They are seriously reconsidering that part.
Now Trump being Trump it was of course mainly words to get a better deal. But to other parties, words have more meaning. So the long term effects are probably not beneficial to the US. Neither are moves like excluding Swiss from Chips. Now if the Swiss would have sold those to sanctioned countries - that might have been a understandable reasons. But like this, people are looking for new ways not involving the US.
"Only 18 trusted allies will be granted unrestricted access to this technology in future, wrote the online portal of French-speaking Swiss television RTS on Sunday. These include Germany, France and Japan."