European dependency on foreign technology has been in the news recently with breathless headlines about ‘kill switches’ and risks to critical national systems from reliance on US and Chinese technology.

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On June 12, the White House restricted access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all non-US users without warning. Anthropic has since announced plans to restore access, but the episode cut through years of policy debate and made the stakes concrete.

Critical infrastructure dependency can be switched off at any moment by a decision taken in Washington, with no notice and no technical recourse for the organizations affected.

Consider what that means in practice. Hospitals, banks, and national defense systems running AI that goes dark in a crisis, a conflict, or a diplomatic standoff. Customers unable to access deposits. Airlines grounded. Military operations halted.

These are nightmare scenarios which Europe’s leaders are now confronting, not least because EU countries rely on non-EU tech for 80% of products and services. The next Fable 5 situation will not be the last.

The European Commission recognised the urgency. Its European Technological Sovereignty Package, released June 3, includes plans to triple data center capacity, steps to strengthen the European semiconductor industry, an “open source-first approach”, and measures to make data centers more sustainable given their substantial energy demands.

At the national level, the UK announced a £500 million Sovereign AI Fund and a £1.1 billion AI Hardware Plan, while France........

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