The politics of global AI: US tech leaders must listen to the winds of change

I was in London recently, in a run of meetings with executives, and witnessed the intensifying debate around the importance of a digital sovereignty strategy in the UK.

Sparked by economic and national security concerns, the reliance on US big tech is now being challenged around the world at a time when geopolitical instability is eroding global trust in US leadership.

Europe's build it locally movement

Europe, France, and Germany are the clearest examples. There's a ‘build it locally’ sentiment that is shifting their public services onto European and open-source software platforms. This movement is backed by new legislative proposals such as the Cloud and AI Development Act and the Chips Act 2.0, aimed to boost EU self-reliance in key areas such as semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, and AI. The Cloud and AI Development Act alone would triple the EU's data centre capacity within five to seven years and create a sovereignty framework with four tiers of assurance for cloud providers, based on where data physically sits, how independent the provider is from non-EU control, and how transparent its supply chain is - paired with a new EU-wide procurement framework that gives public administrations coordinated purchasing power.

The message to US cloud and AI vendors is clear, that selling into Europe's public sector will increasingly mean proving your infrastructure meets a sovereignty bar. Similar policies have already been implemented in other regions such as the Middle East, specifically in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN, the Public Investment Fund's AI company, recently struck a partnership worth hundreds of millions of euros with France's Mistral AI, with plans for up to 600,000 AI chips and a gigawatt of compute capacity by 2030, aimed at keeping data, intelligence, compute, and operations under the customer's control. It's a third path between buying entirely from the US and building entirely alone, and it's the one more countries are going to choose. All with the same goal of trying to escape the tech dominance of China and the US.

Why the old playbook no longer works

Many US tech and pharma leaders are treating geopolitical uncertainty as a temporary headwind to just wait out. I don’t see it that way. This is now a permanent input to how you go to market. Don’t assume that your old sales playbook still works. The companies that are going to do well internationally over the next several years are the ones that treat local data residency, local investment, and local stakeholder relationships as core business requirements from day one. Look at what the Cloud and AI Development Act's assurance tiers actually measure – not whether your product works, but where your data lives and who ultimately controls the company that holds it. Those are architecture and governance decisions, and they have to be made years before a sales conversation happens.

A view from between borders

Perhaps I see this differently because I've spent most of my life moving between countries. I'm Dutch by birth, Canadian by citizenship, and have spent much of my professional life building businesses in the US while working with customers and partners around the world. What strikes me in conversations today is that national interests and global collaboration are no longer viewed as opposing forces. Ten years ago, the discussion was often framed as a choice between openness and protectionism. Today, most leaders are looking for a middle path.

When I sit down with healthcare executives in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia, I rarely hear anti-American sentiment. What I hear instead is a desire for partnership on terms that reflect local priorities. They want access to the best technology, wherever it comes from, while maintaining confidence that their citizens' data, critical infrastructure, and economic interests remain protected. That's a reasonable position. In many ways, it's the same position the US itself has taken throughout its history in strategically important industries.

Not anti-American, just pro-sovereignty

American companies should resist the temptation to interpret these requests as rejection. They're better understood as a sign of maturity in global digital markets. Countries that are investing heavily in AI want to participate in shaping the future, not simply consume technology developed elsewhere. The winners in this next phase of AI will not be the companies that insist on a single global model. They will be the companies capable of combining world-class innovation with genuine respect for local needs, local institutions, and local ambition.

None of this means US tech companies can't compete globally; healthcare organisations abroad clearly want the innovation American companies bring. I hear that directly in nearly every meeting I have overseas, across very different regulatory environments. However, earning that trust looks different than it did five years ago. It means showing up prepared to connect into regional ecosystems, demonstrate an understanding of changing national requirements, and be prepared to adapt products and services. None of that is unique to AI, but AI companies are often the ones most tempted to skip it. They mistake the speed of technological progress for the speed of trust-building.

The case against full independence

It is equally important for other countries to resist legislation and purchasing practices that only favour home-grown solutions. The India AI Impact Summit earlier this year offered a useful model of restraint here: rather than pursuing full independence, most participants focused on meeting specific national needs – India itself chose to extend its existing digital public infrastructure to support AI across its 22 languages, rather than building an entirely separate stack from scratch. That's the more sustainable version of sovereignty. By embracing distributed, agentic AI architectures, countries can foster innovation, grow their talent base, and capture economic value while preserving sovereignty. After all, no single national or regional market, not even one as large as the EU, is big enough to sustainably fund scientific research, provide electricity, and access to local data and edge computing devices, including robots.

America's chance to lead differently

The US also has an opportunity to regain some of the trust it's lost. There are early signs it's starting to take it: at that same India summit, the US did something it hadn't done at the prior Paris gathering – it endorsed the resulting declaration, and launched an American AI Exports Program aimed at helping partner nations build AI capability on US chips, cloud, and models while explicitly promising them as strategic autonomy, rather than a one-size-fits-all American stack. That's the right instinct, and it needs to become the default posture, not a one-summit exception.

The US can build on that by leading from the front on AI regulation and actively building the public-private partnerships, like the International Network of AI Safety Institutes, required to reduce threats of frontier models as they barrel towards recursive self-improvement and threaten human society as we know it. This effort is something all tech leaders must get behind. The goal should not be to persuade every country to adopt an American model. It should be to become the partner of choice for countries building their own. In a world increasingly focused on sovereignty, trust, not technological superiority alone, will determine who leads.

About the author

Marten den Haring, PhD, was born in Belgium at a NATO compound and grew up in the Netherlands. He attended business school in Europe and also has degrees in international politics and economics. Living in or being educated across Norway, Sweden, France, Canada, and now the US has given him a robust perspective on the economics, culture, and innovation that support the business of healthcare. Dr den Haring joined Lirio in May of 2019 and was named CEO in June of 2021. He is passionate about digital technologies that reshape how we live, work, and play. Dr den Haring has more than 25 years of product development and operations leadership experience in other fields, including financial services, law enforcement, and national security. Prior to Lirio, He served as the senior vice president of platform services at Element AI, which was co-founded by Turing Award winner, Dr Yoshua Bengio. Dr den Haring also held executive positions at Oracle, OpenText, and Digital Reasoning. Each of these roles – and his global perspective – informs his approach to building relationships and teams that promote the role of artificial intelligence and behavioural science in healthcare patient personalisation.