In a silicon civilization, software is the basic infrastructure of state power. States, armies, factories, hospitals, banks, and households all run on code — and almost none of them control, see, nor understand the source of the systems that run and manage their daily lives. As that code is increasingly being written and operated by AI, the dependency deepens. Users are discovering that their data is being handed off to a handful of closed frontier models concentrated in a handful of American labs, accessible only on their terms. From a political and strategic standpoint, the question of who controls software is therefore a question of sovereignty.
The power imbalance between the United States and its European allies has been widening for decades, and one of the widest gaps has opened in software. Depending on American security guarantees is one thing; relying on American software to run the state and power the economy is another. European countries are right to lament how access to their own basic services and most important institutions depend on systems they do not fully control. But recognizing this vulnerability does not mean that those dependencies can be reversed by decree. Taken literally, software sovereignty would require every country to build its own cloud provider, operating system, office suite, cybersecurity industry, frontier AI laboratory, and developer ecosystem, closer to the fantasy of autarky than to the reality of sovereignty. It’s also unattainable for virtually every country on earth, the US and China included.
European countries must decide which dependencies are acceptable and which are not. In some areas, like defense, intelligence, or critical infrastructure, domestic ownership or direct control of the stack may be necessary. In others, sovereignty is better secured through competition among providers, open standards, portable infrastructure, contractual protections, and the ability to mix domestic and foreign, closed and open-weight technologies without becoming captive to any one of them.
America’s Software Monopoly
The role of software in sovereignty is not a new concern. The dominance of Microsoft’s operating systems during the PC era already raised questions about Europe’s dependence on American technology, and spurred interest in domestic and open-source alternatives. The most consequential to emerge was Linux, released by Finnish student Linus Torvalds in 1991 and developed thereafter as open-source software, by a global community of enthusiasts. Linux never unseated Windows as the dominant desktop operating system, but it became a major rival in servers and, eventually, the cloud (which most of the internet now runs on). We have seen similar dependence on American software in almost every category: Google in search, Zoom and Teams in workplace software, and the American social networks — X, Facebook, Instagram — that shape media narratives around the world. Now, AI has raised the stakes of American technological dominance once more; the models writing most of the world’s software are themselves made in American labs.
Everyone agrees that America has dominance over the software industry upon which the world runs. This gives the United States a remarkable source of national — even imperial — power. American software companies make up much of the operating layer of modern life: AI models, cloud computing, operating systems, office software, cybersecurity tools, payment systems, developer platforms, enterprise software. It’s a form of power with no traditional equivalent — not military, diplomatic, nor cultural — and most of us carry a symbol of it in our pockets.
When a foreign company uses American services, it is entering an American-led ecosystem, adopting US standards, workflows, interfaces, and even its jurisdiction. European powerplayers like Renault or the Deutsche Bank run on Google Cloud, and their governments are no different. European tax systems, intelligence agencies, public services, and defense operations increasingly depend on software that is supplied, maintained, or influenced by American firms. In March 2026, Britain’s tax authority awarded Amazon Web Services a £472.8 million (roughly $630 million) contract to move off three legacy data centers and move services into the cloud; every other bidder withdrew, so AWS was the only option for this contract. Australia, meanwhile, is investing at least $2 billion (AUD) in a Top Secret Cloud built with AWS for its defense and intelligence agencies. The European Commission relies on Microsoft 365 for its own administration. Indeed, in March 2024, the European Data Protection Supervisor found that the Commission, which likes to fashion the EU as a “regulatory superpower,” had violated the bloc’s own data-protection rules, including those governing international transfers and control over how personal data was processed. The watchdog ordered the Commission to suspend its contractual, technical, and organizational arrangements with Microsoft unless it came into compliance. Even in China, the country that has done the most to pull away from the American software ecosystem, Windows still runs on 79 percent of desktops.
American software power is potent because it is self-reinforcing. Foreign firms use American software because it helps to make their business more efficient and is easy to adopt; governments use it because it has already proven itself; developers build on it because the surrounding ecosystem of tools, libraries, documentation, and users is nearly impossible to reproduce. The ecosystem is the moat. GitHub alone had passed 180 million developers and 630 million repositories in 2025. China has made a serious effort to build a parallel ecosystem, yet its GitHub equivalent, Gitee, reports only 14 million developers and 40 million repositories. Most Europeans use GitHub or other US alternatives like GitLab, but Europe’s most prominent independent alternative, German nonprofit Codeberg, has only recently passed 200,000 accounts and 300,000 repositories.
This kind of power cannot be built by governments, only by a dynamic private sector. But in an era when autonomy matters more and more to individual states because of the shattering of the illusion that global institutions and international alliances could compensate for power disparities between states, how the US wields its software hegemony may determine whether allied governments keep embracing American technology. If American technology comes to be seen as a geopolitical liability because it is perceived as intertwined with the American state, allies will have every incentive to reduce their dependence on it, even if that means turning to less desirable alternatives, including Chinese ones. That outcome would weaken the technological position of both America’s allies and of the United States itself.
