On Friday, when the U.S. government pulled the plug on global access to Anthropic’s most powerful AI models, it confirmed some of Europe’s worst fears. For the first time, Washington had effectively used what some had dubbed a “kill switch”—the ability to cut off foreign access to U.S. AI systems.
Politicians around the world responded with panic and anxiety about their own countries’ dependence on U.S. AI technology. In Europe especially, it reignited calls for what officials describe as “sovereign AI”—the idea that countries should control the AI models, computing infrastructure, and data that underpin the increasingly critical technology, rather than depending on systems that can be restricted or withdrawn by foreign governments.
Europe has, for some time, been heavily reliant on the U.S. for its technological infrastructure. The EU relies on non-EU countries for more than 80% of its technology and 70% of its cloud computing, according to the European Commission and the European Parliament. The U.S. and China together control roughly 90% of global AI computing infrastructure, according to AI research firm Epoch AI, leaving Europe with limited capacity to train or run AI models independently.
Over the past few years, and particularly since U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term in office, countries have increasingly seen American behavior as erratic and threatening to the established global order, with everything from unexpected tariffs to demands that Denmark surrender Greenland to the U.S. In light of this, that dependency on U.S. technology has started to feel like a strategic vulnerability. Some governments had begun taking concrete steps to reduce their reliance on the US: the European Parliament replaced Google with Qwant, a French privacy-focused search engine, citing concerns over personal data collection, while Germany, France, and the Netherlands have moved Microsoft off public-sector infrastructure.
But the Anthropic shutdown makes the stakes, when it comes to the AI race, harder to ignore. Aside from France’s Mistral, whose models currently lag their American counterparts, Europe does not have a frontier AI company, and the continent’s data center build-out has also been plagued by high energy costs, capital constraints, and regulation.
In the UK, Member of Parliament Al Carns said British hospitals, companies, and researchers had been suddenly stripped of access to Fable 5. Tom Tugendhat, a former UK security minister, said that the incident demonstrated that national security is now more about “code than cannons,” criticizing the UK’s regulatory approach for prioritizing safety over building competitive AI capacity.
Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s minister for AI, said the move had significant implications for defense. “We’re seeing again and again the most capable models used in drones, counter-drone defence systems and cyber security—those are now the fundamental fault line for who wins and who loses in warfare,” he said. “The central question for our national security and defence is a question of our AI capability.”
Politicians across the continent also called for Europe to accelerate the development of its own AI models. Many reactions focused on Mistral, the EU’s most credible AI contender, which is reportedly in talks to raise $3.5 billion in funding at a $23.2 billion valuation.
Former French prime minister Édouard Philippe said the incident showed that AI is now critical infrastructure, as essential as electricity or the internet, and that infrastructure controlled by others is infrastructure that others can unplug. Bruno Retailleau, a French 2027 presidential candidate, said the move should serve as a “wake-up call,” arguing that a nation that depends on others for its technology is a nation that can be unplugged overnight.
In Finland, MEP Aura Salla said Europe cannot keep building its tech stack on access that can be switched off overnight by a foreign government, while in Germany, MEP Sergey Lagodinsky pushed for the EU to team up with middle powers such as Canada, Australia, Singapore, and the U.K. to pool compute capacity through a consortium approach.
“This is something that we have always known, but never really felt,” Sandra Wachter, a professor of technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, told Fortune. “Everybody is aware that we are very dependent on technology from the U.S…but we have never quite felt what it’s meant to be on the shorter side of the stick—on the side that actually has to face the kill switch.”
Europe’s policy response
Just weeks before the shutdown, the European Commission had unveiled what it billed as its answer to this vulnerability. On June 3, it released the European Technological Sovereignty Package, targeting cloud computing, AI, semiconductors, and open source. Its two main legislative proposals—Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act—set out objectives for the EU’s semiconductor industry and local cloud and AI providers.
The Cloud and AI Development Act aims to triple data center capacity in the EU over the next five to seven years.
“We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said.
The package targets an estimated €422 billion ($490 billion) in total investment across semiconductors, data centers, cloud, AI, and open-source software over the next decade, though the Commission has yet to confirm how exactly that will be financed, saying it will consult with member states and the European Investment Bank on funding mechanisms.
Critics have questioned Europe’s capacity to deliver on the commitment. The Commission has deferred to member states on how procurement rules would actually be enforced, and under the proposed regulation, only around 10% of cloud contracts would carry a strong European sovereignty standard, with the remaining 90% open to all suppliers.
Competition economist Cristina Caffarra, founder of the Eurostack Industry Initiative, told The Parliment the package was “very feeble,” arguing the Commission had watered down previously stronger mechanism for buying European under pressure from Washington.
Some experts, such as Wachter, argued that Europe should focus on developing smaller, more efficient AI models, which can be run using smaller data centers and consume less electricity, rather than trying to match the scale of American frontier systems.
If the capability gap amounts to only a few percentage points, Wachter questioned whether closing that gap justified the costs of an all-out race.
“This whole idea of racing—if we’re not racing now, we’re going to be left behind—is also a narrative that plays into the hands of the people that are developing those technologies,” she said. She also suggested that building alliances with like-minded countries around the world offered a more sustainable path for Europe than trying to out-build the U.S. alone.
American soft-power
The concerns about over-dependence on America extended well beyond Europe. At February’s AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, conversations about the sovereign AI issue—and a potential coalition of “middle powers”—were front and center.
Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist and AI pioneer, previously told Fortune the question of AI sovereignty was also one of global power.
“It’s a question of democracy and a kind of equitable world order in which no one country can use technology to dominate the others,” he said. “We don’t want to end up in a world where we have two hegemons who each control part of the world.”
While the U.S. may have had legitimate national security grounds for acting, the manner of the intervention risks undermining America’s influence globally, according to Jonathan Iwry, a fellow at the Wharton Accountable AI Lab.
“America’s global influence rests on more than economic and military power alone,” Iwry told Fortune. “It has also depended on moral leadership and being viewed as a reliable steward of an open international order—one whose institutions, technologies, and markets set the standard and inspire other nations to choose democracy over autocracy.”
The move may also hurt a broader strategy the U.S. has been pursuing to shape the global AI landscape before China can. Pax Silica, for example, is a U.S.-led technology alliance designed to build secure semiconductor supply chains and advanced manufacturing networks among strategic partners, with the explicit aim of countering Chinese AI development. The alliance—which includes Japan, South Korea, the U.K., and Israel—is Washington’s attempt to lock allies into the U.S.-aligned AI infrastructure ecosystem. At the New Delhi summit, India became its latest member, a significant diplomatic win for Washington.
Frontier AI has itself become an instrument of American soft power, Iwry said, and the way the U.S. exercises control over it will shape whether allies continue to orient their technological ecosystems around the United States.
“Exercising unilateral control might increase U.S. leverage in the short term, but it could also encourage allies to reduce their dependence on American AI over the longer term,” he said. “The broader challenge isn’t just protecting U.S. national security, but doing so in a way that preserves our allies’ trust and confidence. Otherwise, the very actions the U.S. is taking to preserve its global leadership might encourage its allies to turn elsewhere.”
