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Happy Saturday one and all,

Brian McGleenon, Global Head of News at BeInCrypto here!

European heads of state don’t stand at podiums to announce they are surrendering their nation’s independence. It happens much more subtly, death by a thousand cuts.

Sovereign countries like the UK, France, and Germany could soon be relics of the past. The very concept of the nation-state may end up saved for posterity, kept in a taxidermist’s display in some dusty museum in our fast-approaching, humanity-eclipsing, supra-national, AI-corporatocracy, run by the men who own the thinking machines.

It sounds a bit like science fiction, but this week’s discussion on how AI infrastructure is eroding democracies revealed a stark truth. When reliance on foreign AI infrastructure becomes central to a country’s critical systems, such as healthcare, defence, and the economy, thinking you still have sovereignty is like thinking you own your house… while handing the keys to someone who can lock you out whenever you don’t do their bidding.

My discussion this week with Dr Tirath Virdee of DRE Digital, Lord Chris Holmes of the House of Lords, and Charles Kerrigan, a partner at CMS, described how the trajectory the UK and other European nations are on could see that reality become actualised.

As Frank Herbert famously wrote in Dune:

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

The 30-day question

Here’s the test that cuts through the abstraction. Ask any Western government: which supplier, if they stopped cooperating with you tomorrow, would bring your whole nation to a halt within thirty days?

For most of them, the honest answer is a short and alarming list. Maybe three or four American cloud firms, one Dutch company that makes the lithography machines nobody else can build, and one Taiwanese manufacturer that produces the world’s most advanced chips.

Rather than a healthy market relationship with lots of interchangeable vendors, this reads more like dependency with a single point of failure, dressed up as smart procurement.

A market is something you can walk away from. A dependency is something that can walk away from you.

The danger isn’t that a tech CEO formally “outranks” a prime minister. It’s both narrower, and stranger, than that: the occasional decisive moment when a private individual holds a capability the state simply does not have.

The issue isn’t whether his decision was right or wrong, it’s the principle it established. Take the night in 2022 when Ukraine launched a high-stakes drone strike against Russian warships off Crimea.

As the attack drones closed in, their feeds went dark. Elon Musk had personally refused to activate Starlink coverage over the target zone, fearing the strike might escalate into a broader war. In an instant, one private citizen’s geopolitical judgment overruled an elected government’s military strategy. Ukraine’s commanders had the weapons, but a CEO across the ocean held the kill switch.

Sovereignty, it turns out, is no longer primarily about who signs the orders. To an increasing degree, it’s about who owns the infrastructure those orders depend on.

The UK has a live, homegrown example, and it sits inside the most sensitive dataset the country holds.

In November 2023, NHS England awarded a Palantir-led consortium the contract to build and run its new Federated Data Platform: a deal worth up to £330 million over seven years, designed to knit together the fragmented data of hundreds of NHS organisations.

Palantir—founded in 2003 with early backing from the CIA’s venture arm, and sitting squarely under US jurisdiction—beat rivals including Oracle and IBM.

Legal challenges and “no Palantir in the NHS” campaigns followed; ministers are now reportedly eyeing the contract’s break clause, with the first exit point falling in early 2027.

But the detail that should give everyone pause is the justification itself. The reason repeatedly offered for choosing an American vendor was one of necessity. No domestic supplier could deliver to the required scale, or timeline, we were told.

Yet far from being reassurance, this is a confession; a structural dependency written into a legal contract and signed in good faith.

A predictive AI system doesn’t sit politely alongside a public health service waiting to be swapped out. It embeds, dictating how patients are triaged, how hospital beds are allocated, and how operational metrics themselves are defined.

Once an external algorithm is woven into daily clinical practice, ripping it out becomes far more complicated than your standard procurement decision. What sounds like a simple service swap is closer to open-heart surgery on a living institution. Indeed, you don’t truly own a tool you can no longer remove; over time, the tool owns the process.

As Lord Chris Holmes put it bluntly during our discussion, there is ultimately no such thing as “NHS data.” It is our data. Health records are human lives rendered in digital form.

The question of who holds the keys to that infrastructure is more than a technical footnote; it’s a fundamental question of citizenship.

👉 Watch the full discussion on YouTube

Have a great weekend,
Brian