Suggesting US tech is as risky as Chinese tech is ‘a giant false equivalency,’ top US cyber official says.
“The leadership claim of the U.S. is being challenged, perhaps already lost,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the conference Friday. | Kay Nietfeld-Pool/Getty Images
February 13, 2026 7:17 pm CET
MUNICH, Germany — U.S. officials have countered Europe’s push for technology sovereignty from America with a clear message: It’s China you should worry about, not us.
The European Union is rolling out a strategy to reduce its reliance on foreign technology suppliers. Donald Trump’s return to office has put the focus on American cloud giants, companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink and X and others — with European officials increasingly concerned that Washington has too much control over Europe’s digital infrastructure.
As political leaders and security and intelligence officials met in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, Washington sought to calm nerves. The idea that Trump can pull the plug on the internet is not “a credible argument,” the United States’ National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross told an audience Thursday.
Europe and the U.S. “face the same sort of threat and the same threat actors,” said Cairncross, who advises Trump on cybersecurity policy. Rather than weaning off America, wean off China, he said: “There is a clean tech stack. It is primarily American. And then there is a Chinese tech stack.”
Claiming that U.S. tech is as risky as Chinese tech is “a giant false equivalency,” according to Cairncross. “Personal data doesn’t get piped to the state in the United States,” he said, referencing concerns that the Beijing government has laws requiring firms to hand over data for Chinese surveillance and espionage purposes.
The attempt to quell concerns is notable even if it may not change the direction of travel in Europe. The European Commission wants to boost homegrown technology with a “tech sovereignty” package this spring. It presented a cybersecurity proposal in January that, if approved, could be used to root out suppliers that pose security risks — including from America.
“We want to ensure that we don’t have risky dependencies when it comes to critical sectors,” the Commission’s Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen told POLITICO in an interview in Munich on Friday. “We see this in AI, quantum technologies and semiconductors — we must have a certain level of capacity ourselves.”
Europe’s attempt to pivot away from U.S. dependencies, while not new, has gained support in past months as the transatlantic alliance creaked. The POLITICO Poll conducted in February showed far more people described the U.S. as an unreliable ally than a reliable one across four countries, including half the adults polled in Germany and 57 percent in Canada.
“The leadership claim of the U.S. is being challenged, perhaps already lost,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the conference Friday.
Rebalancing act
Europe is still working out what a forceful attempt to build technology sovereignty would look like, as it reforms everything from industrial policy programs to procurement rules and data and cybersecurity requirements on companies and governments.
Top European cyber officials in Munich told POLITICO that technological sovereignty does not mean cutting ties with trusted partners.
Vincent Strubel, director of France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI, said sovereignty means avoiding being bound by rules set elsewhere. “It’s about identifying what leverage non-European countries may have based on the technology they provide," Strubel said in an interview. “It’s not about being friendly or unfriendly with any country — it’s about recognizing that we [currently] have no say in how that leverage might be used.”
Claudia Plattner, head of Germany’s cybersecurity agency BSI, said, "We need to become more independent. We need to strengthen our local and European industries ... We need to become digitally successful — that is essential to economic strength and to security.”
The BSI plans to test sovereign cloud offerings from several large tech companies, including AWS and Google. The testing will examine whether European services can operate independently from parent systems and will help inform Germany’s national cloud strategy.
Critics of Europe’s efforts to turn away from the U.S. say it is bound to lead to worse security.
Christopher Ahlberg, the CEO of threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, said he understood that things like military command and control must remain national, "but if you start choosing sub-par cyber products just to achieve sovereignty, you’re going to be target No. 1 because threat actors will discover the vulnerabilities.”
Common ground on China
While tensions persist over the U.S.’s dominant position, Washington and European capitals have common ground when it comes to caution over Chinese tech.
The EU is drafting legal requirements to cut out Chinese tech from critical supply chains including telecom networks, energy grids, security systems and railways. That move drew the ire of the Chinese government, which called it "blatant protectionism."
Many of the measures mirror what U.S. authorities have done in the past decade. “The U.S. understands what national security is. They don't want to hear: 'The U.S. is a threat.' But they understand resilience," said Sébastien Garnault, a prominent French cyber policy consultant.
Trump “is putting America first, and the same goes in cyberspace,” Cairncross said. But, he added, “we don’t want it to be America alone. We want that partnership.”
Laurens Cerulus contributed reporting.