several weeks ago, The US ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5. Shortly after the model was available again (although with changes), but this event served something else: to make tangible a threat that Europe had been talking about in the abstract for years. We spoke with Andreas Prins, global director of Sovereign Solutions at SUSE and expert in digital sovereignty, about what this episode reveals about European technological dependence, and why the political response continues to lag behind the problem.
The trigger for Fable 5. The suspension of Fable 5 and Mythos, Anthropic’s most powerful models, marked a before and after in terms of digital sovereignty. According to Prins: “The most interesting movement that emerged from this is the awareness on the part of companies. We often talked about sovereignty, digital resilience and independence, but never to the level of a government effectively retiring software (…) people suddenly realized that dependency is real.”
Prins, who works for one of the largest open source infrastructure companies, says conversations with companies have changed a lot after this incident. The same managers who once “ran to deploy Gemini, Anthropic, or global vendors like OpenAI” now realize that “I probably don’t need the newest, coolest model; what I need is a model I can control, running on my own premises or in my data center, with open source software I can audit and inspect.”
Notice to sailors. However, the temporary suspension of these models did not cause havoc in European companies and institutions for a simple reason: they were very new models and there was no time to integrate them into critical processes. “If this suspension had occurred within three or five months, with companies operating their chatbots, customer service and decision-making engines based on these models. The impact would have been much greater,” warns Prins. In this sense, this event functioned more as “an early warning signal than a real-time crisis.”
A question of trust. Trump’s obsession with taking over Greenland At the beginning of the year, relations between the US and Europe deteriorated rapidly. Europe began to realize something uncomfortable: The US was not the reliable partner I thought and that technological dependence could be a weapon of pressure. For Prins it is clear: “It is a question of trust and, if I evaluate digital sovereignty in Europe, the feeling is quite uniform: we no longer trust US providers or hyperscalers, and therefore we want to build our own alternatives.”
Digital sovereignty is also a question of resilience, that is, what can happen to your business if software stops working tomorrow or if it stops receiving security patches. “Sovereignty is fundamentally a business risk assessment rather than a purely IT issue. You can take technological risks, as long as you do it consciously,” says Prins.
A tangible example. To illustrate how risk perception is changing, Prins tells us the case of a company in the Netherlands that had its main environment in a data center in Frankfurt, managed by a hyperscaler, and also a data center below sea level in the Netherlands. The question was whether to maintain backup infrastructure in the Netherlands, where dam failure could cause flooding and cause serious damage.
After a risk analysis, they came to a conclusion: “The risk of flooding from levee failure was lower than the risk of an American hyperscaler pulling the plug on European customers.” Wow, they trust more a structure which in many parts is already approaching a century of life.
The current situation. Europe is already taking its first steps towards technological independence. It has been announced European Technological Sovereignty Package and there is also the Cloud and AI Development Actbut we are still in a very incipient phase and it is difficult to imagine a joint response of 27 countries, each with their own interests. Prins admits that “it will be difficult.” SUSE has worked with Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands in drafting recommendations to the EU, and their reading is that the disagreement is not in the objective, but in the execution since each one works with different tools. “To build a strong Europe we should unify these initiatives more and leave aside national particularities, although the market is large enough for several suppliers.”
When asked about which countries are doing better, Prins avoids pointing out a single leader and prefers to talk about specializations: “Norway and Finland are taking giant steps in sovereignty applied to the defense industry”, in Germany there are states transforming their infrastructure on a large scale; in Spain, cites projects such as Penpot and the SUSE’s recent alliance with OpenChip. For its part, the United Kingdom “remains closer to the US for obvious reasons.”
The importance of open source. Andreas Prins works in an open source company, but defends that its use goes beyond interest, but is a necessity: “to achieve the strictest levels of compliance required by the Cloud Act, the only viable way is to use open source,” he says. The advantages are auditability, forking capability, and exit speed, referring to “the ease of migrating to another system.” He contrasts this with how hyperscalers operate: “they capture customers with low entry costs and complex markets, whose long-term costs and dependencies are often underestimated.”
When asked why this type of open initiatives have not caught on in Europe, he points out that “we should not underestimate the power of lobby of the big tech companies” and admits that there is also a visibility problem: “There are excellent open source alternatives in Europe, but they tend to be invisible. “I myself was surprised to see the potential we already have here.”
Inaction is the worst scenario. When asked what would happen if Europe does not act in the coming years, Prins draws two scenarios. In the worst case “that geopolitical tensions calm temporarily, we put aside sovereignty ambitions and continue as before.” In the best case scenario (and the one he most trusts): “that figures such as Open Source Liaison Offices become standard and companies prioritize supplier diversification as a risk factor.” And he slips in an idea that suggests that the point of no return has already been crossed in part of the public sector: “For many government agencies there is no turning back on this path.”
Institutional Europe vs citizen Europe. The European Parliament recently took a symbolic but important decision remove Google search from all your computers in favor of the French alternative Qwant. However, it is one thing for institutions to take steps and another for it to reach citizens. Will Europeans give up tools like Google or ChatGPT? Prins is clear about it, unless there is a blockage: “Honestly, no. There will be exceptions, like Linux enthusiasts or people very deep in the sector who already use Signal or Telegram, but for the vast majority convenience rules. If it is in an easy market with a couple of clicks, people will use it.”
Image | SUSE
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