Even the European Commission emails via American servers; CivAI therefore consciously chooses a different approach

Almost three-quarters of EU institutions route their email through American servers. This is evident from research by NOS into the DNS data of seventy EU institutions and sixty UN organisations. Even the mailbox of the European Commission itself is managed by an American provider.

The European Defence Agency, several financial regulators, and the European anti-money laundering watchdog have their mail servers hosted by Microsoft. This means that American intelligence agencies could potentially read along, and that the US government can demand, via the Cloud Act, that a provider such as Microsoft, Google, or Amazon hands over data. Not as a hypothetical scenario, but as a legal authority that already exists.

It can be done differently

The European Parliament, Europol, and the Court of Justice of the EU deliberately do not use American mail servers. They demonstrate that digital sovereignty is not some distant concept, but a choice that institutions themselves can make. The question is therefore not whether it is possible, but why so many other institutions have not yet made that choice.

For organisations working with AI, this is exactly the same question, but with even more sensitive data. Student records, patient files, policy documents, personnel data. As soon as these pass through an American system, the same Cloud Act applies, the same dependency, and the same risk.

Why we at CivAI choose Europe

At CivAI, we made that choice a long time ago. EduGPT, GovGPT, OrgGPT, and CareGPT run on European infrastructure, with Scaleway as our hosting partner. Data from schools, governments, healthcare institutions, and other organisations remains within the European Union, under European regulations, without detours via an American cloud giant.

This is not a marketing claim but an architectural choice. Organisations working with us know where their data is stored and who has access to it. Exactly the kind of clarity that, according to NOS, is lacking at three-quarters of EU institutions.

The NOS research is a wake-up call. Not because it is new that Europe is dependent on American tech companies, but because it shows how widespread that dependency is, right at the heart of the European Commission itself. We believe things can be done differently, and demonstrate every day that they can.

Source: NOS, "Majority of EU institutions route mail via American servers", nos.nl/artikel/2633082