AI sovereignty in Europe: what this dependency means for practitioners

TL;DR: Europe is drifting into dependence on US and Chinese foundation models that shape what people read and believe, according to Asenion, while the AI Act cannot by itself prevent strategic reliance on externally controlled model, data and compute infrastructure. Governance without domestic capability leaves the EU writing rules for systems it does not own or fully understand.

Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Asenion: “Europe risks becoming an AI colony”.

Key questions

Q: How should organisations govern AI systems that rely on external foundation models?

A: They should treat external foundation models as third-party critical infrastructure, not as ordinary software components.

Q: When does AI become a governance issue in cybersecurity operations?

A: AI becomes a governance issue when its outputs influence prioritisation, response, policy, or other decisions that security teams rely on.

Q: How do teams know whether AI governance is actually working?

A: Look for evidence that every AI interaction can be traced end to end, from identity and intent to output and enforcement.

Practitioner guidance

• Define model sovereignty requirements Set explicit requirements for where model weights, training data, inference and logging may reside, and treat cross-border dependency as a governance decision rather than a technical convenience.
• Build lifecycle evidence into AI controls Require documented evidence for training data selection, evaluation, monitoring, exception handling and rollback before a model is approved for production use.
• Review who can operate model infrastructure Map the identities, service accounts and delegated admins that can change prompts, weights, routing or deployment settings, then limit them to the minimum operational scope.

Bottom line: The article frames AI dependency as a governance failure, not just a market or technology choice, because external model control weakens oversight and recovery.

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