Need for European independence from US-controlled SaaS

It is becoming increasingly important to move away from all US-controlled Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as quickly as reasonably possible.

I have today read the new US “National Security Strategy https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

It is in many respects quite terrible. For example, it is rather pro-Russian and quite hostile to important core principles and institutions of democratic European self-government.

However, here is a sentence from this document which is in my eyes quite reasonable: “As Alexander Hamilton argued in our republic’s earliest days, the United States must never be dependent on any outside power for core components—from raw materials to parts to finished products—necessary to the nation’s defense or economy.”

Of course, this is not only a reasonable principle in the context of the US. As a European I find it likewise quite natural to think we must get rid of all outside dependencies for anything that is essential for Europe’s economy or military defence capabilities. Global trade can do a lot of good, but it must certainly not be allowed to make us dependent on foreign powers that are actually openly hostile to principles and institutions of democratic European self-government.

The US is now such a hostile foreign power. In writing this, I’m of course not thinking of the people in the US in general, but of the US as a country with a powerful federal government and many powerful businesses, most of which will generally act in accordance with what the US government tells them to do or not to do.

Now, some economic dependencies are worse than others.

I would suggest that the worst kind of dependency is when critical business processes depend directly on any kind of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), so that if for any reason that online service is no longer available, with immediate effect —and potentially no warning at all— those business processes cannot continue.

This includes of course Software-as-a-Service services in the field of AI. Alternatives exist (even if they are less well-known), such as open-weight AI systems that you can run on your own hardware, so that there is no risk of business disruption due to an AI SaaS service suddenly no longer being available due to any kind of political conflict.