The timing was almost too neat. Days before more than 180,000 people were due to file into VivaTech in Paris, and before G7 leaders sat down at the lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains, the United States tightened access to Anthropic’s most advanced models for foreign nationals.
Europe arrived at its own party having just been reminded, again, that the tools its companies depend on can be switched off by a decision taken in Washington.
Technological sovereignty was always going to dominate both gatherings. It now dominates them with an edge. Policymakers and executives spent the run-up fretting, in the careful phrasing of the week, about American AI and the scarcity of credible European alternatives.
The fretting is not new, but what is new is the demonstration that the dependency is not theoretical. When the US ordered Anthropic to bar foreign nationals from its top systems, the company found the restriction impractical to enforce selectively on a shared cloud and switched the models off for everyone, worldwide, including the European users who had nothing to do with the order.
Europe’s answer, such as it is, has a name attached to it more often than any other. Mistral has become the company most cited inside the EU’s sovereignty framing, by the French government that champions it and by the critics elsewhere in the bloc who think one national champion is a thin basis for a continental strategy.
The Paris firm has raised debt to buy Nvidia chips, committed to new data centres, and positioned itself as the European alternative. Whether one company can carry the weight the rhetoric places on it is the question nobody at VivaTech especially wants to answer out loud.
The structural problem sits underneath the speeches. Much of Europe’s frontier-AI work still runs on American cloud infrastructure, and GPU-as-a-service arrangements have a way of reinforcing the dependency they are meant to relieve. Renting compute from a US provider is not the same as owning it, a distinction that becomes vivid the moment access policy changes.
The EU has planned five AI gigafactory sites and awarded sovereign-cloud contracts, but the build-out is measured in years, and the political risk is measured in news cycles.
At Evian, the conversation took a more transactional turn. Representatives of several G7 countries used the summit’s opening to raise, with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the idea of a ‘trusted partners’ arrangement that would let allied nations or companies reach the very American models now being restricted. It is a revealing ask.
The European pitch in public is independence; the European request in private, this week, was for a better seat at the American table.
VivaTech itself will look, as it always does, like a continent in confident motion: AWS and Nvidia showcasing French startups in their Startup Village, robotics demos, voice and decision-intelligence pitches, the usual choreography of a sector that wants to be taken seriously. The choreography is real and so is the anxiety beneath it. Both can be true at once.
What the week makes clear is that Europe has settled on the diagnosis and is still arguing about the prescription. The dependency is named, the vulnerability is conceded, the gigafactories are planned. The continent now has four days in France to decide whether sovereignty is a thing you build or a thing you negotiate. On this week’s evidence, it is hedging on both.
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