The EU and US Can’t Agree on Tech — or Trust

Mark Scott is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press. He is also a senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab's Democracy + Tech Initiative, where he conducted the workshops discussed in this article.

When it comes to digital policymaking, the United States and European Union are falling out of love with each other, even as both sides gradually move closer on everything from artificial intelligence governance to children’s online safety.

The generational trust deficit is not limited to tech. Brussels and Washington no longer see eye-to-eye on once fundamental transatlantic principles like free trade, NATO and free speech.

But the political rhetoric now engulfing EU-US digital relations is hamstringing nominally apolitical topics that lie at the heart of how Americans and Europeans use everyday digital services.

It’s creating friction between these long-time allies just as adversarial countries like China and Russia are growing more emboldened to export their authoritarian vision on tech to the wider world. Where once digital was an also-ran in geopolitics, the rise of AI and next-generation technologies like electric vehicles and quantum computing has placed digital policymaking near the top of every leader’s priority list.

Ironically, the now overt wariness between Europe and the US to work with each other did not come from a specific fall-out on tech even as President Trump criticized Brussels for treating Silicon Valley as its personal piggybank.

Instead, the White House’s unsuccessful attempt in early 2026 to annex Greenland — an autonomous territory within Denmark, a NATO ally — was a turning point for European officials.

For many, that signaled a step change in the 27-country bloc’s relationship with the US that hardened EU politicians and policymakers’ resolve to reduce Europe’s perceived reliance on an ally whose actions had increasingly become transactional and, in some cases, arbitrary.

“If the sovereignty of a European ally were affected, the cascading consequences would be unprecedented,” according to a read-out on what French President Emmanuel Macron had told his ministers in early 2026.

Those consequences are starting to take hold despite President Trump’s failure to secure possession over the self-governing part of Denmark, whose local government vehemently rejected Washington’s advances.

Ever since Ursula von der Leyen returned as president of the European Commission in 2024, the German politician has championed greater digital sovereignty for the 27-country bloc. That includes reducing the EU’s dependence on technologies provided by third-party countries, as well as investing billions of euros of public funds in critical digital infrastructure like high-performance computing.

This policy objective was already underway before the EU-US trust deficit widened in 2026. But in June, Brussels announced its European Technological Sovereignty Package, which included efforts to build high-end semiconductors and AI-focused infrastructure within the bloc. The proposals didn’t explicitly name-check the US. But von der Leyen made clear what she expected the project to do.

“We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure,” she said.

Brussels’ political rhetoric, however, has not kept pace with the practicalities of building a “Made in Europe” alternative to digital industries overwhelmingly dominated by US tech giants. The need to respond to the widening trust deficit with the EU’s most important ally has yet to be matched with the capabilities required to turn that policy objective into a reality.

Many EU member states still have contradictory approaches on how far to reduce their reliance on American companies. Countries like France have gone all-in, while the likes of Poland and other Eastern European states are less willing to pull the plug on their US ties, often for national security reasons.

Cash-strapped domestic governments also do not have the financial resources to match the collective hundreds of billions of dollars earmarked from the likes of OpenAI, Amazon and Google to ongoing digital infrastructure. Blockbuster EU-funded digital infrastructure projects similarly struggle to become reality.

The bloc’s doubling down on open-source technologies — a central component of June’s European Technological Sovereignty Package — as a counterweight to US-owned AI models may prove more bark than bite. Many of these services are developed outside of the bloc, including US-based developers accounting for the greatest overall volume of open-source contributions in 2025.

A European government also experimented with an open-source model developed by a non-EU company, only to find it carried significant biases that officials had not anticipated, according to a digital sovereignty workshop hosted under the Chatham House Rule in June by the Atlantic Council’s Democracy + Tech Initiative.

The irony is that despite the worsening transatlantic politics, Brussels shares many digital policymaking priorities now en vogue in Washington and US state capitals.

Meta’s recent social media settlement in California mirrors similar findings by the European Commission against both Meta and TikTok, respectively. American and European antitrust officials have secured similar recent victories against Google’s dominant app store. Both sides of the Atlantic desperately need an EU-US agreement on how national law enforcement agencies can access electronic evidence in ongoing criminal investigations to keep their citizens safe.

Yet these potential areas of cooperation are currently non-starters.

The transatlantic trust deficit is too large, too entrenched and too politically charged to allow either side to admit publicly what many policymakers will claim in private: there is still more that unites Brussels and Washington on tech than divides them.