What is a ‘kill switch’ that has European businesses so concerned?

Europe is growing more and more uncomfortable with its technological dependence on the US.

A new Proton study found that as many as 74% of European business leaders are afraid of a US kill switch cutting off their technology access. EU lawmakers are voicing the same concern.

“The US holds a real ‘kill-switch’(nova janela) over essential technologies and they are more than willing to use it,” said Christophe Grudler, a French member of European Parliament.

His Finnish colleague Aura Salla put it more bluntly: “Europe cannot keep building its tech stack on access that can be switched off overnight(nova janela) by a foreign government. We must take action to reserve our data and our market primarily for European tech to scale it and build our own frontier AI.”

And Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s vice-president for tech sovereignty, said the EU wants sensitive services and data controlled in Europe — with no foreign government or company holding a kill switch.

But what is a technological kill switch, and what are EU lawmakers so concerned about?

What is a technological kill switch?

A kill switch in a political context refers to the power of the US administration to restrict or cut off a foreign business’s access to a tech service. 

The government can enact a kill switch through an executive branch decision without any court order or additional sign-off. It just needs the relevant agency exercising authority Congress has already delegated to it.

What are EU lawmakers afraid of?

Considering the deep dependence of European businesses on US tech platforms, a kill switch represents an existential risk. Proton research from last year found that 74% of public European companies use American email providers.

The fears are not theoretical. Three recent cases show what that looks like in practice:

• Export controls on chips to China. The US restricts which Nvidia chips can be sold into China, using export control law rather than a sanctions list. Nvidia had to design a cut-down chip, the H20, specifically to stay under the threshold, and even that has been caught up in further restrictions since. The effect lands on every business on the other end of the chip supply chain: Chinese AI companies lose access to leading-edge compute, and Nvidia itself has said the restrictions cost it billions in lost sales. The restriction targets an entire product category — chips, above a certain capability, going to a certain destination — and everyone in that category is affected at once.
• The Anthropic Mythos and Fable cutoff. In June 2026, the US Department of Commerce ordered Anthropic to cut off foreign national access(nova janela) to its two most capable AI models, citing export control rules. This one didn’t name a country or an individual either. It reached every foreign national at once, including at allied institutions in Europe. Businesses that had built workflows on those models lost access with no warning and no way to appeal individually. The US eventually reversed the order, but the Trump administration continues to hold a leash on frontier AI models(nova janela).
• Sanctions cutting off Microsoft access. In February 2025, the US sanctioned ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan(nova janela) over the tribunal’s investigation into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Within days, Khan lost access to his Microsoft email account. Unlike the chip and Anthropic cases, this one worked through a named designation rather than a category-wide restriction — but the effect was the same: a US company had no legal choice but to comply, and an international institution’s operations were disrupted as a result.

These cases show how commercial export of US technology sits entirely with a US agency, and the businesses affected have no legal standing to challenge it.

How is a technological kill switch even possible?

It can be triggered fast, through either of two US laws.

• The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) lets the president declare a national emergency and, on that basis, gives the Treasury Department authority to designate a specific person or entity. Once designated, it becomes illegal for any US company to keep doing business with them — which is what happened when the US sanctioned ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan in 2025, and Microsoft cut off his email access.
• The Export Control Reform Act (ECRA gives the Commerce Department authority to bar US technology from reaching a listed destination, end use, or category of user — including by nationality — without naming any individual. This is the authority behind both the China chip restrictions and the Anthropic cutoff.

IEEPA needs a named target, but the ECRA can restrict an entire category of user in one move, which is why the Anthropic order hit every foreign national simultaneously rather than one company or country.

What can Europe do?

At the macro level, European leaders are focused on reducing the dependence itself. The European Commission’s Cloud and AI Development Act, announced in June 2026, aims to bring sensitive cloud and AI workloads under EU-based control rather than relying on US providers for them. 

Alongside it, the Chips Act 2.0(nova janela) is meant to build up Europe’s own semiconductor capacity, so the region isn’t reliant on Nvidia or other US chipmakers for the hardware underneath its AI ambitions. Both are still years from changing the underlying dependence — sovereignty legislation moves slowly, and Europe’s tech base is starting from a long way behind.

In the meantime, European businesses don’t have to wait on Brussels. Choosing providers more carefully — understanding which services sit entirely within one company’s legal reach, and what happens if that access disappears overnight — is something a business can do today. So is investing in European solutions that keep data and operations under EU jurisdiction, where a US executive order simply doesn’t reach.

Want to learn more about whether Europe is prepared for an outage, a cyberattack, or a provider cutting off access outright? Read our multi-country survey asking founders, CEOs, and IT directors about the effects of tech disruption on European businesses