Who supports digital sovereignty regarding artificial intelligence? An analysis of public attitudes in four European countries

Countries’ capabilities in digital technologies – from digital infrastructure and semiconductors to software solutions and online platforms – have become a central factor for their economic development and state capacities (Foster & Azmeh, 2020; Gruber, 2019). This has led to mounting geopolitical competition especially between the US, China, and the European Union (Christakis, 2020). The European Union (EU) and its members countries have responded to this constellation with a renewed impetus to their industrial policy agenda to promote the development of home-grown digital innovations and business models (McNamara, 2024; Seidl & Schmitz, 2023; Terzi et al., 2023). In this way, countries aim to establish digital sovereignty, understood as the ability to exert control over the adoption and use of digital technologies and their impact within societies (Floridi, 2020; Pohle & Thiel, 2020). In this constellation, artificial intelligence (AI) figures as a key technology that is pre-eminently important for countries’ digital sovereignty. Scholarly work has noted that AI plays a crucial role for countries’ economic competitiveness and state military capabilities (Csernatoni, 2024). Some observers even point to a veritable race for AI (e.g., Kamphuis & Leijnen, 2021; Smuha, 2021). How much these major developments resonate in society remains unknown. The present article, therefore, sets out to shed light on the extent to which EU citizens support efforts to attain digital sovereignty in the area of AI – even if this comes at a cost. More specifically, we investigate whether EU citizens support digital sovereignty related to AI even if this means promoting applications that are more expensive and perform worse. We test the role of people’s AI enthusiasm, their support for state interventionism, and their Eurocentrism and nationalism in explaining support for AI sovereignty. We also probe whether trust in the target of regulation for digital sovereignty (i.e., US and Chinese tech companies) as well as trust in the EU as the main regulator are relevant predictors of support for digital sovereignty in AI. To address these questions, we analyze data collected with a custom survey fielded in four EU countries – Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania, and Sweden – in which citizens have been found to hold different attitudes towards both US and China.