Skip to main content
June 3, 2026 • 7 min read • By The Public Code US Team

Europe Just Bet €2 Billion on Public Code. America Is Still Writing Blank Checks.

The EU's Tech Sovereignty Package puts 'public money, public code' and 'open source first' procurement into official strategy. Here's why Brussels did it — and what it means for American tech giants.

A circle of EU stars merged with code brackets beside a giant €2 BILLION figure and the words public money, public code

Europe Just Bet €2 Billion on Public Code. America Is Still Writing Blank Checks.

On June 3, 2026, the European Commission adopted a document with the dry title “Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, accompanied by an EU Open Source Strategy” — COM(2026) 503. Inside the bureaucratese is a sentence this campaign has been waiting years to see in official policy:

“Public money, public code.”

Software developed with public funding should be published, the strategy says, so that other public administrations can reuse it instead of paying to develop similar systems from scratch. Alongside it: an “open source first” principle for cloud and AI procurement, procurement guidelines for evaluating open source solutions, a proposed Open Source Maintenance Instrument, and even the ambition to develop Europe’s capacity to fork critical open source projects if governance or security concerns arise.

The Commission plans to mobilise €2 billion over seven years — from public and private sources combined — behind the strategy. It is, as OpenForum Europe put it, “the most serious institutional commitment to open source that European policy has produced.”

America invented the open source movement. Europe just wrote its industrial policy.

Why Brussels Did It

The strategy’s rationale is stated bluntly, and every line of it applies to the United States.

Dependence. More than 80% of the key digital products Europe relies on come from non-EU countries. The EU spends roughly €264 billion a year on proprietary digital products and services from outside Europe — overwhelmingly American. Commission Vice President Henna Virkkunen: “It is time we harness what we have in Europe to give us control over our digital future.” Ursula von der Leyen, presenting the package: “We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure. This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices.”

Lock-in. The digital rights group EDRi describes the mechanism precisely: dependence “on platforms controlled by a handful of mostly US-based companies weakens public sector autonomy, creates vendor lock-in and exposes governments to foreign legal regimes.” European public bodies, EDRi notes, “outsource ICT to foreign hyperscalers… and in the process lose crucial inhouse knowledge.” Sound familiar? It should — it’s the vendor lock-in tax, itemized at continental scale.

Waste. Public funds are “spent over and over by all the different public administrations to develop the same kind of software” — the strategy’s own diagnosis of the duplication problem. Every European country rebuilding the same systems from scratch, each paying a vendor for code it doesn’t own. California’s $236 million unemployment system, but as a continent-wide accounting entry.

The trigger. European capitals got a live demonstration of the risk on June 12, 2026, when a US Commerce Department export-control directive barred foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — and Anthropic disabled both models worldwide. (The directive’s legal basis is contested, and Anthropic called it a misunderstanding — but the political effect in Brussels was immediate.) Imagine your hospitals, grids, and citizen services running on models a foreign government can switch off. Europe imagined it, and then it happened.

Microsoft, for its part, has acknowledged that it must comply with US court orders and therefore cannot fully guarantee EU data sovereignty. Twenty-four European cloud CEOs have warned against “sovereign washing” by US hyperscalers — local branding over foreign control.

What It Means for American Companies

This is the part US tech should read twice. The strategy doesn’t stand alone — it stacks with two other instruments:

  1. The Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) introduces sovereignty levels for cloud procurement, up to requirements for EU ownership, EU control, and even personnel citizenship for the most sensitive workloads. Gartner’s assessment, via The Register: “future public sector procurement will shift from purely open competition toward a ‘European preference’ model for highly secure workloads.”

  2. The proposed Public Procurement Act (September 2026) writes a horizontal “European preference” framework into public buying — letting authorities favor European offers and exclude bidders from countries without reciprocal market access. The United States is not on the covered-countries list.

An EU-based open source vendor now gets three tailwinds: a technology preference, a sovereignty preference, and an origin preference. A US proprietary vendor faces three headwinds. The US Ambassador to the EU warned against protectionist measures in May 2026; Reuters reported the package “defies criticism from the U.S. government over Europe’s regulatory approach to American industry.” The Big Three cloud providers are already responding with locally-based services and joint ventures — the market is repricing American software’s political risk in real time.

Honest caveats, because we do those here: the strategy itself creates no binding obligations — it’s strategy, not law. The €2 billion is money “to be mobilised” from public and private sources, not a Commission budget line. The Maintenance Instrument and fork capacity are proposed, not funded. And the procurement preference is permissive — buyers may restrict, not must. Near-term effects depend on implementation, and implementation is where European tech policy has historically gone to nap.

But the direction is unmistakable, and the Free Software Foundation Europe’s demand shows where the pressure is going: FSFE welcomed the strategy but warned that principles alone aren’t enough. Senior policy manager Johannes Näder: “‘Public Money? Public Code!’ must become a mandatory requirement for public tendering.”

The Part America Should Be Embarrassed About

Here’s the comparison that stings. Europe’s strategy cites research (OpenForum Europe/Fraunhofer ISI) finding that every euro of public investment in open source generates a return of four to five euros for the European economy. The US already proved the underlying economics — Harvard’s estimate puts open source software’s value at $8.8 trillion. America built the commons. Europe is now building the policy to harvest it.

Meanwhile in Washington: the SHARE IT Act finally made federal code-sharing a legal mandate in 2025 — real progress — but agencies may still keep the vast majority of custom code proprietary, and the teams that championed open source inside government (18F, USDS) were gutted the same year. Europe is writing “public money, public code” into strategy with billions attached. America is writing it into guidance with exceptions attached.

The EU didn’t adopt this strategy because it loves bureaucracy. It adopted it because dependence on foreign vendors for the software that runs hospitals and grids turned out to be a sovereignty problem, a security problem, and a budget problem at the same time. Every one of those problems exists in the United States, at larger scale, with the same vendors.

Europe just showed what a government looks like when it decides to own its digital future. America’s move.

  1. Sign the petition. Make “public money, public code” American policy, not just European strategy.

  2. Contact your representatives. Ask them to match Europe’s commitment — with binding requirements, not guidance.

  3. Get organized in your state. Ballot initiatives are how we create the political conditions, state by state.

  4. Share this post. €2 billion. “Public money, public code.” In official EU strategy. People need to see this.

Read more: Europe Can Now Prefer European Software. America Can’t Even Prefer Open Software. · Germany Is Saving $17 Million a Year by Ditching Microsoft. America Is Still Writing Blank Checks. · Open Source Is Worth $8.8 Trillion — And We’re Leaving Most of It on the Table

Sources

Share This Post

Ready to Take Action?

Sign the Petition