The White House via Flickr
Beyond the Antichrist and the Kill Switch
Jakob Hensing
Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi)
Jakob Hensing is a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow in Fall 2025.
His permanent position is at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin, where he focuses on the intersection of economic and security policy. His work explores how power and security considerations are reshaping the global economy, especially in terms of competition and collaboration on emerging technologies. Previously, he worked for more than five years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and at Orphoz Public, McKinsey’s dedicated public sector branch in Germany. He holds a doctorate in politics and a master’s in international relations from the University of Oxford, as well as a bachelor’s degree in integrated social sciences from Jacobs University Bremen.
His research at AGI focuses on the interplay between the U.S. government and the tech sector in shaping and implementing technology-related measures to advance national security and foreign policy objectives—in short, U.S. techno-economic statecraft. It seeks to understand how the positions and expertise of industry stakeholders feature in the U.S. policy process, also with a view to enabling allies such as Germany to engage constructively and to benefit from learnings for their own management of the public-private interface in an era of global technology competition.
Jakob’s most recent GPPi study titled “Action Potentials: Neurotechnology, Brain-Computer Interfaces, and Implications for Germany’s and Europe’s Foreign and Security Policy,” appeared in August 2025. His writing and commentary have featured in Foreign Policy, Wirtschaftswoche, and Newsweek, among others.
The real political economy of U.S. tech statecraft and what it means for Europe
One of the many remarkable features of the second Trump presidency has been the highly public embrace between his administration and tech sector leaders. This development has drawn much attention not just in the United States, but also on the other side of the Atlantic, where many commentators have reacted with alarm.
Two factors have fed European concerns. The first one is the rise of the “tech right” as a political project that goes far beyond established brands of opposition to tech regulation. Following the lead of Peter Thiel, a growing number of tech leaders have espoused a worldview centered on drastically accelerating technological progress and on a comprehensive overhaul of societal institutions. This has entailed distinct sympathies with autocratic modes of government and, in Thiel’s case, intriguing religious references, such as warnings of a coming “Antichrist” who will seek to bring about a transnational, bureaucratic super-state. Second, it has become widely recognized how technology dependencies can be leveraged in pursuit of foreign policy objectives. Concerns that such U.S. tech statecraft could turn against Europe have existed since at least Edward Snowden’s revelations about tech-enabled surveillance, but they have markedly gained salience. Given Europe’s extensive reliance on U.S. providers of cloud services, software, and other technologies, ideas such as a “kill switch” that could deprive Europeans of essential digital services have captured the public imagination.
Much of this discourse tends to portray the tech right as representative of a new consensus or at least as the dominant force within the sector and to treat joint appearances of key figures and President Trump as indicative of unity of purpose or tech sector sway over policy. A closer assessment of tech companies’ revealed policy priorities and relations with the administration, however, yields a more complex picture, with important implications for Europe. This article argues that the political economy of U.S. tech statecraft continues to make a major weaponization of Europe’s dependencies on the United States unlikely. To improve their strategic position in a hostile global environment, Europeans should therefore focus less on reducing dependencies on U.S. tech per se. Rather, their paramount concern should be to achieve a step change in economic performance and to develop new distinctive strengths, for which leveraging U.S. technology will often remain essential.
What does “tech” want?
The point here is not to downplay the significance of the rise of the tech right. The transformation of Silicon Valley’s political role is undoubtedly consequential for the United States and beyond—including in ways that that this article does not have space to explore in detail, such as some tech leaders’ personal engagement with right-wing parties in Europe. Others have chronicled this remarkable process, detailing the longer-term antecedents, the idiosyncratic trajectories of key figures, as well as the broader annoyance that took hold among tech executives amid Biden-era efforts on matters such as anti-trust and user privacy. By 2024, key individuals like Elon Musk were ready to go all-in on helping Trump get re-elected. Many others at least hedged their bets and then quickly sought to align themselves with Trump after the election. Importantly, though, this often looked more like an opportunistic move to navigate what they rightly expected to be a highly personalized and transactional environment rather than a whole-hearted ideological conversion to the tech right.
The basic positions articulated by many tech firms over the past year do exhibit a vaguely accelerationist bent. Leaders have consistently extolled the transformative potential especially of AI and warned that regulation could hinder progress, also constituting a competitive disadvantage in the “AI race” against China. This stance contrasts with the emphasis that many of them had placed on AI safety and averting catastrophic risks a few years ago. Currently, AI lab Anthropic stands largely alone among major firms with its continued public emphasis on this matter, though other companies have continued working on it less visibly.
Overall, tech firms’ policy priorities have not betrayed an elaborate ideological agenda but rather conventional business rationales.
Companies have also engaged in some open pushback against regulation abroad. For example, a March 2025 Google submission for a public consultation noted that “some governments are seeking to impose undue bureaucratic burdens on AI development and deployment, often in ways that would primarily affect U.S. companies” as well as the U.S. government’s role in “engaging foreign governments to deter efforts to impose measures that restrict AI development and deployment by U.S. and local companies.” Simultaneously, however, firms have hastened to underline their commitment to regulatory compliance and their readiness to accommodate digital sovereignty concerns through technical and governance safeguards. Examples such as Microsoft’s “European Digital Commitments” or the “sovereign AI” concepts advanced by Nvidia, Oracle, OpenAI, and others illustrate the importance they attach to maintaining access to the European market, and firms have displayed little eagerness to be publicly associated with a more forceful campaign against regulation abroad.
Overall, tech firms’ policy priorities have not betrayed an elaborate ideological agenda but rather conventional business rationales. For example, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank drew President Trump into the launch of their $500 billion “Stargate” project shortly after his inauguration, shifting attention away from Biden’s export controls agenda and toward accelerating AI development by U.S. players, notably through vast datacenter buildout. Nvidia has perhaps made the most distinct attempt to change the direction of U.S. policy, arguing that greater leeway to export its chips to China would not only bolster its revenues, but also help the United States maintain a strategic advantage. Meta, given its primary concern with applying AI on its social media platforms, has unsurprisingly continued to emphasize the merits of open-source models. Diverging priorities have also sometimes pitted tech firms directly against each other, with Microsoft and Google supporting legislation that would hinder Nvidia’s exports to China.
Forms and limits of tech sector influence under Trump 2.0
Besides the lack of evidence of a concerted push for a tech right agenda on the part of companies, their relations with the administration also warrant closer consideration. Arguably, tech sector influence under the current administration takes place in five broad forms. All of those are significant, but each also exhibits clear limitations and complications.
First, the financial largesse of tech donors is surely of some importance to Trump and his political allies. The sector’s financial heft is illustrated by “Leading the Future,” a $100 million Super PAC created to promote AI-friendly candidates and defeat “doomers” in the 2026 midterms. Important in immediate electoral contexts, this form of influence is, however, mostly indirect in terms of actual policy decisions, and hardly unique to tech.
Second, personal interactions at the highest level have been frequent and sometimes consequential, such as when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang apparently convinced Trump to revoke export controls on a chip that his company had designed for the Chinese market (in return for surrendering a share of the profits to U.S. government coffers). A typical pattern in these interactions, however, has been performative deference of tech leaders, who have showered the president with praise and extravagant gifts. Steven Levy has dissected in detail how executives seem, above all, fearful of falling out of political favor. As venture capitalist Michael Moritz put it to Levy, “they’re doing their best to avoid being held up in a protection racket.” Trump’s team has certainly left little doubt regarding its readiness to engage in unconventional forms of state intervention in the economy, which could affect any company’s fortunes for good or for ill.
Third, at least some tech leaders have built a direct rapport with broader political constituencies. The clearest instance of this is Elon Musk, whose acquisition of Twitter (now X) has enabled him to roll back content moderation and to enhance his ability to reach and engage with a vast audience. Zooming out, though, tech leaders’ position in Trump’s coalition appears deeply precarious. For example, Steve Bannon as a key figure in the self-described “national populist” strand of MAGA has frequently railed against the “broligarchs.” Describing them as “crawling on their bellies to try to get into and pollute this movement,” he has reportedly warned that “the tech bros are out of control” and that “they are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy.” Ideologically, the deeply elitist visions of figures inspiring the tech right such as Curtis Yarvin appear worlds away from the grievances animating the MAGA base.
Fourth, an interesting feature of Trump 2.0 is the strong role of people with a tech sector background within the administration. The most prominent instance of this was again Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he certainly had a disruptive impact that reverberated across policy fields. The number of people with personal links to Peter Thiel is also conspicuous, including senior executives such as “AI czar” David Sacks. Their role in shaping U.S. tech statecraft is undoubtedly substantial, especially as their personal access to Trump affords them a role in concrete decisions rather than merely in abstract policy processes. In the latter regard, people with tech sector experience or apparent sympathies for accelerationist thinking can be found at all levels of the apparatus. However, the significance of this presence for policy outcomes remains less clear, with many observers highly skeptical of the importance of conventional processes under Trump altogether as well as of the administration’s capacity to implement policies in practice.
Finally, tech sector decisions and thinking have played an important role in shaping the fundamental focus and solution space for policy. As Dean Ball, the lead author of the administration’s AI Action Plan has put it, “our strategy rests on the presumption that advanced AI is both possible in the near-term and hugely consequential, and that compute is the high-order bit to advancing AI […]. This is not so much the government’s strategy […] as it is the strategy of the leading AI companies and hyperscalers.” Arguably, it is at this level that tech companies have exerted the greatest influence in shaping actual U.S. tech statecraft under Trump 2.0.
Implications for U.S. tech statecraft and priorities for Europe
The upshot of the practical priorities of tech companies and of their complicated relations of power and influence with the administration is a U.S. tech statecraft agenda that remains overwhelmingly focused on the “AI race” against China. The coherence and depth of strategy toward this end should not be overstated, as key questions remain subject to presidential decisions that appear highly situational and high-level documents such as the AI Action Plan have not been translated into a detailed roadmap. Both in terms of articulated strategy and practical decisions, though, there has been a clear shift of focus toward accelerating AI progress in the United States and toward further expanding the market share of U.S. technologies across the globe (with open questions around the boundaries regarding China itself). This latter element is apparent in the “technology prosperity deals” with the United Kingdom, Japan, and Korea, in large-scale investments in the Persian Gulf, as well as in the July 2025 Executive Order on “Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack” that envisages “consortia” of U.S. companies providing an integrated offer especially to middle and lower-income countries.
Effectively strengthening Europe’s strategic position will above all require unlocking novel sources of wealth and economic leverage.
Experts within the administration, staffers of Congresspeople focusing on tech and foreign policy, and DC think tankers are often deeply familiar with Europe’s role in the global AI landscape, notably regarding the centrality of Dutch company ASML as the sole provider of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Nevertheless, the continent remains largely peripheral to discussions about America’s global tech strategy, in which it is often just vaguely mentioned as a (highly dependent) ally.
Questions around European tech regulation do occasionally acquire prominence, notably where they are connected with MAGA concerns around “free speech” and “woke” policy: For example, the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) featured prominently at the 2025 National Conservative Conference, where a speaker decried it is as “the most corrosive censorship regime in the west today.” As this is a matter on which the priorities of other parts of Trump’s coalition and the preferences of important tech companies actually coincide, it is certainly possible that such views might acquire top-level attention and lead to an amplification of pressure on Europe to roll back parts of the DSA. While this political alignment is less clear on other regulations such as the Digital Market Act (DMA), AI Act, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), those are also susceptible to being lumped together as rules deemed detrimental to American interests.
However, to the extent that tech leaders do have political influence, exploiting European dependencies on the industry itself seems like a very unlikely way for such pressure to be exercised. Any major steps (such as the much-dreaded denial of access to cloud services) would come not only with immediate financial costs to the companies affected but also do lasting damage to their credibility to partners around the world, undermining the very foundations of current efforts to promote the global use of American technology. Tellingly, the Trump administration has already repeatedly attempted to draw questions of technology regulation into a broader bargain on the future of transatlantic economic relations and also shown its readiness to ultimately leverage Europe’s existential vulnerabilities regarding military security. It is in these domains, rather than through tech statecraft in a narrow sense, that Europe will continue to face the greatest pressure in the foreseeable future.
Against this backdrop, Europeans may still politically decide that they consider some areas (such as public services) so sensitive that even a low likelihood of external tech dependencies being weaponized is untenable. If so, they should focus on establishing clear principles for satisfactory mitigation, comprising not just formal criteria such as companies’ country of incorporation but also their effective exposure to pressure by foreign governments due to their global business footprint. Overly complex assessments may, ironically, create a situation that large U.S. incumbents will typically find easier to navigate than their putative European challengers.
More generally, though, Europeans face a world in which hard bargaining by their traditional transatlantic ally is only one seminal challenge among several, notably including the military threat from Russia and pressures emanating from an authoritarian state-capitalist China. Besides urgent defense investments, effectively strengthening Europe’s strategic position in this environment will above all require unlocking novel sources of wealth and economic leverage. Toward this end, driving AI adoption in Europe and building distinctive strengths will be a key ingredient. It is sometimes more clearly appreciated in the United States than in Europe itself that the continent has considerable potential to translate AI advances into actual value creation. Most importantly, it boasts strong manufacturing expertise and a substantial industrial base, featuring companies with troves of proprietary data that will be required to unlock the major productivity gains that AI’s economic promise ultimately hinges upon.
Leveraging innovations and infrastructure made available by American providers (most obviously in the form of chips and datacenter capacity) will often be vital to realizing these opportunities and should take precedence over generic dependency concerns. One challenge will be the rapid trend toward vertical integration and further consolidation of the U.S. AI landscape, which may complicate efforts to engage with individual players in ways that maximize European interests. While regulatory simplification is needed in some regards, one area where Europeans should therefore certainly not unnecessarily relinquish vital rules is in ensuring adequate competition through the Digital Markets Act. More generally, Europeans urgently need to prepare for a U.S. push toward further entrenching the use of American technologies in Europe along the lines of the above-mentioned “technology prosperity deal” with the United Kingdom, which fused intergovernmental agreements with private investment and technology cooperation commitments. The point should not be to avert such advances, but to channel them in the most constructive direction. It is time to move beyond rearguard action against unlikely forms of weaponization of Europe’s technological dependencies and toward putting the continent into a stronger position for the future.
Supported by the DAAD with funds from the Federal Foreign Office (FF).
