The Kill Switch and the Long Arm

Washington can’t promise allies it will never cut off their access to American AI or reach their data—but it can set, and eventually codify, clear rules for both.

Presenting the European Commission’s technology sovereignty package in June, Henna Virkkunen stated that one of its aims was to ensure that “nobody has a kill switch” over Europe’s critical systems. In the same press conference, Virkkunen—the commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy—singled out the U.S. CLOUD Act as a reason American cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) providers would struggle to reach the new rules’ most stringent sovereignty requirements.

Virkkunen’s comments reflect a major concern driving Europe’s sovereignty push: that reliance on American technology exposes Europe to the American government. But she fuses two different kinds of U.S. power—a distinction drawn sharply in the scholarship on weaponized interdependence, and one built into U.S. law itself. One is the kill switch, which disables or degrades a system by cutting off the access or updates it needs to keep running, through sanctions or export controls. The other is the long arm, which can force a U.S. provider to produce data it holds abroad, or to assist foreign intelligence surveillance.

Contracts, corporate structure, and product design can narrow that exposure, but no guarantee puts an American-owned cloud or AI stack beyond the U.S. government’s reach. Both powers remain in place vis-à-vis any country whose digital ecosystem relies on American providers and U.S. technology.

Europe’s and others’ concerns about these powers are not theoretical. The Edward Snowden leaks exposed the foreign intelligence side of U.S. access to data held by American providers and sparked European litigation over data transfers to the United States, which remains unresolved. The U.S. government has, on occasion, flipped the switch, but it has become a more urgent matter in the wake of the Trump administration’s recently reversed order compelling Anthropic to suspend foreign national access—including at allied institutions—to Mythos 5 and Fable 5, its most capable large language models.

The EU’s sovereignty package attempts to address the risks posed by these powers with location, ownership, control, and supply chain requirements. The proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA)—a key part of the package—would sort cloud and AI services into four assurance levels—from EU-located infrastructure at the bottom to full supply chain control that’s free of third-country interference at the top—and require government agencies to match sensitive workloads to higher levels, in some cases swapping foreign services for European ones.

Europe’s reasoning behind CADA is that a provider subject to U.S. law must comply with U.S. orders, regardless of its contracts. Europe’s answer, then, is to change who owns the provider, and ownership rules are one of the few tools it can use without American cooperation. The CADA may also serve other goals, including industrial competitiveness and resilience. But, in reality, it and similar policies do only limited work against the two powers. The switch follows American inputs. Even a European-owned service may run on American chips, software, models, updates, or support. The long arm follows the data, and if a U.S. company can reach it, then U.S. legal process can reach it.

If Europe’s worry is the switch and the long arm, proposals like CADA are an incomplete answer, and possibly a counterproductive one: years and billions of euros spent for an uncertain return, potentially leading to stagnation at a time when technological advancement is so critical. Those powers belong to the U.S. government, not to any provider, and only Washington can agree to limit them. A critical question that must therefore be answered is not how Europe escapes U.S. jurisdiction but how the U.S. governs the use of its own power.

Continued at Lawfare.