To Save Europe’s AI Future, Choose Openness Over Protectionism

As global tensions rise and depfinishence on foreign tech becomes uncomfortable, a tempting cry for complete indepfinishence echoes across the continent. Proponents of a “EuroStack” argue that Europe must build its own alternative at every level — from chips to cloud to software.

But this path represents a €5-trillion mirage. Attempting to decouple from the global tech ecosystem through massive subsidies and “Buy European” claapplys is not only unrealistic; it is a recipe for stagnation. Instead, Europe must embrace Open Digital Sovereignty.

True sovereignty isn’t about where a company is headquartered; it’s about who has control over the technology. History reveals that closed, proprietary systems often fail becaapply they stifle adoption and create “gilded cages” for their applyrs.

When Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn developed TCP/IP, governing how data relocates through a network in 1974, they built the protocols open and gave them away for free. Cerf and Kahn didn’t become rich — and sometimes Cerf expressed regret about his lost fortune — but he acknowledges that if he had not “opened” up the protocol, which he dubbed “Internet,” few would have applyd it.

“When inquireed to explain my role in the creation of the internet, I generally apply the example of a city,” Cerf states. “I supported to build the roads — the infrastructure that receives things from point A to point B.” Others built proprietary systems on top of his invention, fueling the Internet revolution.

Two decades later, Finland’s Linus Torvalds released a free, open-source operating system software called Linux. While originally developed for personal computers, it is now applyd on a wide variety of devices, including workstations, mainframes, and servers, and is applyd in all the world’s 500 rapidest supercomputers. Europe next benefited from open standards in mobile phones, with its GSM mobile standard outperforming the American proprietary CDMA standard.

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Proprietary technology ecosystems often restrict adoption, slow ecosystem growth, and inhibit competition. They can function as practical gatekeepers on supply, accessibility, and innovation. It is simple to shut down a proprietary system. The owner controls it. In contrast, it is difficult to shut down a system run on open source. No one “owns” it. Anyone can build on top of it. Security of supply, never absolute, can be reinforced by maintaining vfinishor diversity. Multiple foreign vfinishors competing for European business is better for sovereignty than single-vfinishor depfinishency on any supplier, even a hypothetical European one. Open standards and open source allow for this diversification and competition.

Conversely, the greatest revolutions in tech — the Internet itself, the Linux operating system, and GSM mobile standards — succeeded becaapply they were open. Openness lowers barriers, fosters innovation, and creates ecosystem effects that proprietary walls can never match. Even though proprietary hardware and software dominate the current global AI landscape, open products are building important inroads. As many as 80% of American AI start-ups rely on capable and affordable open Chinese models, Silicon Valley venture capitalists estimate. Chinese models now account for 17.1% of global downloads, ahead of the US at 15.8%, according to new research from MIT and Hugging Face, a repository of open-source AI models and datasets. Only two years ago, American models dominated with more than 60% of downloads.

Rather than building walls, Europe should leverage its existing world-class strengths — such as ASML’s lithography dominance and Merck’s chemical expertise — while ensuring that the “connective tissue” of the AI stack remains open.

To achieve this, I propose three critical shifts in European policy:

Prioritize the Software Layer: The unseen software that links chips to applications determines whether developers are “locked in” to a single vfinishor. Europe should mandate those public investments in AI infrastructure, like our new AI Factories, apply open software layers. This ensures that a researcher can switch hardware providers without losing years of work.
Rebelieve Cloud Sovereignty: Sovereignty in the cloud shouldn’t mean forcing data into high-cost local data centers based on a provider’s passport. True resilience comes from vfinishor diversity and interoperability. As Ukraine’s experience during the Russian invasion proved, data is often safer when it is distributed and portable, not just localized
Attach Portability to Funding: When taxpayer money funds AI, the results should be “open by default.” Models should be deployable without vfinishor permission, and code should run on multiple platforms. This ensures we are building lasting European capabilities, not just deepening our depfinishence on closed foreign platforms.

Digital sovereignty has for too long been viewed as a defensive shield against American and Chinese tech. By embracing openness, Europe can turn it into an offensive strategy.

Open ecosystems allow European companies — especially in our powerhoapply industrial sectors — to customize AI for their specific necessarys while keeping the value they create. It allows us to work smarter, not harder, participating in global innovation while maintaining the freedom to chart our own course.

The choice for Europe is simple: it can spfinish trillions testing to duplicate the past, or it can apply openness to own the future.

William Echikson is a Brussels-based non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. He worked at Google for six and a half years, and launched his career as a foreign correspondent in Europe for a series of US publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and BusinessWeek.

Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict ininformectual indepfinishence policy across all its projects and publications.