Against that backdrop, Europe's dependence on American-made AI is increasingly looking like a liability. In a worst-case scenario, although experts consider this possibility remote, the US could choose to deny access to AI services and crucial digital infrastructure. More plausible is that the Trump administration could use dependence on Europe as leverage as the two sides continue to iron out a trade deal. “That dependence is a risk in every negotiation – and we will increasingly negotiate with the US,” says Taddeo.
The European Commission, the White House and the British Department of Science, Innovation and Technology did not respond to requests for comment.
To hedge against these risks, European countries have sought to land AI production, through funding programs, targeted deregulation, and partnerships with academic institutions. Some efforts have focused on building competitive large language models for native European languages, such as Apertus and GPT-NL.
As long as ChatGPT or Claude continue to outperform European-made chatbots, America's lead in AI will only grow. “These domains are often winner-takes-all. If you have a really good platform, everyone goes there,” says Nejdl. “If you can't produce state-of-the-art technology in this area, you won't catch up. You will always just feed the bigger players with your input, so they get even better and you fall further behind.”
Note the gap
It is unclear exactly how far Britain or the EU plan to go in the pursuit of 'digital sovereignty', lobbyists claim. Does sovereignty require total self-sufficiency across the vast AI supply chain, or only enhanced capability in a limited number of disciplines? Does this require the exclusion of US-based providers, or only the availability of domestic alternatives? “It's quite vague,” said Boniface de Champris, senior policy manager at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a membership organization for technology companies. “It seems to be more of a story at this stage.”
There is also no broad agreement on which policy instruments should be used to create the conditions in which Europe can become self-sufficient. Some European suppliers are advocating a strategy where European companies are required, or at least incentivized, to buy from domestic AI companies – similar to China's reported approach to the domestic processor market. Unlike subsidies, such an approach would help boost demand, argues Ying Cao, CTO at Magics Technologies, a Belgium-based company developing AI-specific processors for use in space. “That is more important than simply access to capital,” says Cao. “The most important thing is that you can sell your products.” But those who advocate open markets and deregulation argue that efforts to exclude US-based AI companies risk disadvantaging domestic companies versus global peers, who must choose the AI products that best suit them. “From our perspective, sovereignty means having choice,” says de Champris.
But for all the disagreement over policy details, there is a broad belief that closing the performance gap with U.S. leaders remains eminently possible, even for labs with limited budgets and resources, as DeepSeek illustrated. “If I were to think now that we won't catch up, I wouldn't do that [try]” says Nejdl. SOOFI, the open source model development project in which Nejdl is involved, plans to release a competitive general-purpose language model with approximately 100 billion parameters to the market in the coming year.
“Progress in this area will no longer be largely dependent on the largest GPU clusters,” says Nejdl. “We will be the European DeepSeek.”
