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and data that underpin the increasingly critical technology, rather than depending on systems that can be restricted or withdrawn by foreign governments.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.
