If you believe the headlines, European AI and Europe are on the brink of an AI breakthrough. Every week, there’s another press release about a “European champion” – Mistral AI in France, Aleph Alpha in Germany, Silo AI in Finland, the latest pan-European initiative. Add in German Telekom partnering with NVIDIA, Norwegian OpenAI infrastructure build, and it all looks like we are catching up with the US giants. But the European boardroom question looms large: Are we really building independent, sovereign and SECURE European AI, or just rebranding imported technology and feeding our company secrets to intelligence services and calling it progress? Let’s cut through the marketing, the regulatory fanfare, and the unicorn hype to get to the facts that actually matter for Europe’s future. 𝔼𝕦𝕣𝕠𝕡𝕖'𝕤 "ℕ𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕝 ℂ𝕙𝕒𝕞𝕡𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕤" - 𝕆𝕣 ℕ𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕝 ℍ𝕠𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕘𝕖𝕤? Let’s start with the reality behind the leading names: - Mistral AI (France): The poster child for French AI innovation, with strong government backing and big funding rounds. - Aleph Alpha (Germany): Promoted as the German alternative to OpenAI, focused on explainable, enterprise-ready LLMs. - Silo AI (Finland): Now positioning itself as Europe’s largest private AI lab, recently going all-in with AMD for its compute stack. - German Telekom + NVIDIA: Germany’s “sovereign” AI cloud partnership, meant to offer European businesses an alternative to the US Big Tech clouds. On the surface, these all sound pretty good, and they sound like real progress. But a closer look exposes a much more complicated, and, for the cautious board member, a worrying landscape. 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕀𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕘𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕒𝕨 ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕓𝕝𝕖𝕞: 𝕎𝕙𝕠 ℝ𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕪 𝕆𝕨𝕟𝕤 "𝕊𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕟𝕥𝕪"? Few outside the deep compliance and infosec world are talking openly about this: Any European AI company headquartered in France or Germany is directly subject to local intelligence and surveillance laws. - In France, the Intelligence Act (“Loi Renseignement”) gives state agencies sweeping powers to require data access from local tech companies, even in the name of “national security” (see itnews). - In Germany, the new Federal Intelligence Service Act (BND law, as amended in 2022) also mandates cooperation and data sharing with the intelligence agencies when required, allowing state trojans and telephone hacking, among other “perks”, completely without cause (see freiheitsrechte).

We built Ask a Pro for that exact moment. Nothing’s worse than being stuck while your client waits. Here’s how it works: 1️⃣ You describe the issue (N8N, Make.com, chatbots, AI automations… anything). 2️⃣ We review it and give you a fixed upfront price → usually $10–$100. 3️⃣ You approve & pay via Stripe. Then one of our senior devs (10+ years in the game) jumps in. 4️⃣ Issue solved within 48 hours. Guaranteed. ✅ If it’s still broken → you get follow-up help. ✅ If we can’t solve it at all → you get a full refund. Zero risk. The bug, blocker, or edge case you’re facing right now? Chances are… we’ve fixed it 2–3 times already for other clients. 👉 Try it here: https://ask.betterscale.ai Who here has already faced a deadline panic because of a “stupid little issue” that took way too long to fix?