Strategic AI capabilities sit at the same structural chokepoint as energy supply: when critical infrastructure is owned or controlled by a foreign party, that party holds leverage. Henna Virkkunen, the European Union's digital chief, applied that logic directly to AI, warning that the technology is becoming a geopolitical weapon and that Europe needs to stop relying on what she described as an unpredictable Washington for strategic capabilities.
The lever Virkkunen is identifying
Strategic capabilities, in this context, means AI that a government or economy treats as load-bearing. The specific risk Virkkunen is naming is not that AI will be deployed against Europe but that access to it can be conditioned or withdrawn. That is how dependency becomes a weapon: the threat of removal, not removal itself, is the source of leverage.
This is an old structure applied to a new domain. Dependency on foreign energy, and later on foreign semiconductors, each went through a similar reclassification. A technology starts as a convenience and, once embedded deeply enough in critical systems, becomes a chokepoint. AI is moving through that transition now.
The word "unpredictable" is doing specific work in Virkkunen's framing. The concern is not necessarily that Washington is adversarial but that Europe can no longer treat its relationship with the United States as a stable, unconditional foundation for capabilities that matter. Reliability, not hostility, is the variable that has shifted.
What strategic dependency actually means for Europe
A bloc that depends on foreign AI infrastructure for strategic functions has, in effect, outsourced a portion of its decision space. If critical government or defense systems run on AI provisioned from abroad, subject to foreign law or foreign executive discretion, the host nation's autonomy over those systems is partial.
Virkkunen's warning frames AI sovereignty as a security issue. That framing shifts the policy conversation away from industrial competition, where the question is whether Europe can build companies that compete, and toward resilience planning, where the question is whether Europe can function if access is denied.