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Trump’s unpredictability is pushing governments and businesses toward open source while Britain remains glued to US tech

OPINION Sick of relying on proprietary programs and American software giants and hyperclouds? Join the digital sovereignty revolution.

It really is the smart thing to do. Honestly, with Donald Trump calling the shots, who knows what he’ll do next? Demand that American companies stop providing services to European companies unless Denmark surrenders Greenland? Order Microsoft to disable Windows 11 unless the International Criminal Court is dismantled? Force Anthropic to lock down Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for international users? Oh, wait. They already did the last one.

Wake up, sheeple! You can’t trust American tech, and I speak as a US citizen whose ancestors first arrived in the States in the 1770s. Finnish MEP Aura Salla put it well at February’s Open Source Policy Summit: “The EU runs on Microsoft. The US could turn us off inside one hour.”

The same is true for the UK and pretty much every country in the world. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.

Some people get it. When I was at the United Nations Open Source Week recently, it wasn’t just European Union countries beating the drum for digital sovereignty. Speakers from Tanzania, Vietnam, Morocco, and elsewhere argued for greater control over their technology futures.

Many of them aren’t just talking a good game. They are actually doing something now. Finally!

For example, the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is dumping Microsoft SharePoint for Nextcloud and OpenProject. Bavaria is also moving toward digital sovereignty. Neither state is jumping from Windows to desktop Linux yet, but, hey, baby steps.

Ireland was preparing to pull the trigger on a Microsoft procurement potentially worth €1 billion when the government called a halt. Opposition politicians then asked why open source alternatives had never made it onto the shopping list.

Ireland’s Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalization, Frankie Feighan, said the agreement for Microsoft software and services had been canceled after “matters of concern were raised by an interested party.”

At the UN Open Source Week, Ireland’s Government CIO, Louise McKeever, said that as far as she was concerned, digital sovereignty is “the ability of a government to maintain control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technologies” in a world of cross‑border data flows, AI, and geopolitical risk – and that makes it “a national security concern” as much as a tech one.

Cian O’Callaghan, deputy leader of Ireland’s opposition Social Democrats, would agree. He said that, for value-for-money reasons and to avoid US technology dependency, Ireland should at least consider alternatives including “LibreOffice, Linux, Thunderbird, and Open-Xchange.”

It’s not just governments getting into the sovereignty act. Airbus is migrating its most critical applications from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway. Why? For much the same reason as governments. Scaleway made a competitive commercial offer, and, as Catherine Jestin, Airbus’s executive vice president of digital, said: “I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective. We want to ensure this information remains under European control.“

Makes sense to me!

In the United Kingdom, however, it’s a different story. A House of Commons Library briefing published in March put it plainly: “The UK Government does not have an overarching policy on digital sovereignty. It has set out its approach to building ‘sovereign capability’ in key technologies.”

The closest thing Britain has is the UK Compute Roadmap. It states that the government wants “sovereign, secure, and sustainable capability,” and directs the UK Sovereign AI Unit to treat compute as a priority area. Back in 2025, which is prehistory by AI standards, Labour wanted to pour £2 billion into sovereign AI. Now? Who knows? Stay tuned.

I might add that, in AI business terms, £2 billion is less than the American companies throw at AI in a week. Believe it or not, the biggest US tech companies are projected to spend about $700 billion on capex this year – roughly $13.5 billion a week.

Yes, I agree. Those are insane numbers. Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of AI bubble spending.

Leaving aside the crazy AI numbers, some people in the UK get that digital sovereignty must be a priority. The Open Rights Group has a petition: Demand UK Digital Sovereignty. I suggest you sign.

As Trump has shown time and time again, “his” US has no “special relationship” with anyone. Just ask Israel or Canada. If the new PM, Andy Burnham, so much as sneezes at Trump, the President could take offense and apply pressure for the UK to lose its access to American tech resources.

To me, there’s no longer any question about it. Everyone, including companies and people in the States, must reduce their reliance on American software and services. Linux and open source alternatives that are not beholden to Washington offer the clearest way forward. ®

Apple’s insurance for multiple devices including iPhones, Watches and MacBooks, is finally expanding a year after launching in the US. AppleCare One is now available in four additional countries: the UK, France, Germany and Australia. The service is set to arrive in those regions on August 4th this year. 

“With AppleCare One, customers in the UK can now enjoy the trusted protection of AppleCare+ in a way that’s simpler and more flexible than ever before — one plan, one price, and the peace of mind that comes with knowing all their eligible products can be covered,” the company said in an article on its UK newsroom. 

In the UK, the service will cost £16.99 per month for three devices, with the ability to add more at any time at £4.99 per month per device. In France, it will cost €20.99 per month and €5.99 per month for the same coverage, respectively, according to 01net.com. That compares to $20 a month for three devices and $6 per month for additional devices in the US. 

AppleCare One provides the same coverage as AppleCare+ with theft and loss, “including fast and unlimited repairs for accidental damage, battery replacement service, and 24/7 priority access to Apple experts,” Apple UK wrote. It also includes theft and loss coverage for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. You can use AppleCare One to not only insure brand new devices, but also ones you already own — provided they’re no more than four years old and in “good condition.” 

Along with AppleCare One, Apple is also bringing theft and loss coverage for iPad and Apple Watch to AppleCare+ in the UK. Those devices join the iPhone, which already has the theft and loss option. The price for that for a base iPad model will start at £4.99 per month in the UK (£49.99 per year), compared to £3.49 for current AppleCare+ coverage without theft and loss. For the base iPhone 17, AppleCare+ with theft and loss is £9.49 per month, compared to £6.49 per month for regular AppleCare+. 

Whether or not you’ll save money on AppleCare One compared to AppleCare+ depends on your devices and coverage. Apple notes that “a customer protecting their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch together can save up to £11.48 per month compared to maintaining separate AppleCare+ with theft and loss plans for each device.” 

However, if you purchased the most basic versions of those devices with AppleCare+ but no theft and loss coverage (£6.49 + £3.49 + £2.49 = £12.47), individual coverage would be cheaper. AppleCare One is therefore best if you have higher-end devices or were planning to ensure them for theft and loss on top of accidental damage repairs. The benefits also accrue if you add a fourth or fifth device, particularly if it’s on the expensive side. 

In the US, AppleCare One looks like an even better deal since AppleCare+ prices just went up for Macs and iPads. The increase is due to higher prices for those devices ranging from $100 for a basic iPad to $500 for an M5 Max MacBook Pro. 

The launch of the latest AI model from a Chinese company — Moonshot AI’s Kimi — reignited debates around American competitiveness and open versus proprietary AI.

While there was plenty of conversation on social media, it seems the debate is also happening behind the scenes in Washington, D.C., where OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly lobbied regulators with concern about open Chinese models.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed why this seems to be such a hot button issue. Beyond suggesting that certain folks should “touch grass” rather than spending their weekends arguing on X, Sean noted that in many ways, this “feels like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts,” with everyone in Silicon Valley “expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away.”

And Kirsten noted that putting heavy restrictions on Chinese AI models could primarily benefit a handful of companies: “Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others?

Keep reading for an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: For folks who have followed the discourse around Chinese AI, this will probably be very, very familiar from the launch of DeepSeek, where basically a Chinese model comes out; on some benchmarks, it does as well, or at least seems competitive with some of the frontier models; and a certain portion of the tech industry loses their mind. 

Some of this [debate] got extra scrutiny because one of the people posting about it was [an executive] at OpenAI. But in general, there [is] this recurring question of: Can Chinese companies beat US companies, at least in some aspects, and do it much more cheaply and in a much more open way?

Sean O’Kane: Yeah, there are many elements of this that feel like we’re seeing repeats of prior freakouts. I think one of my favorites is: Everybody is so ready [for] and so expecting that something is going to arrive and blow everything else away. And I think my favorite example of that this past week was people showing off that “My gosh, Kimi made in 30 minutes an entire replication of macOS.” And yeah, it made a pretty impressive graphical reproduction of what macOS looks like, but it’s not an OS.

We keep seeing these things happen over and over again, where everybody’s so jumpy in the tech industry. And I think in particular, with some of the Chinese models that come out, there’s this expectation, and I think this gets to the core of why people reacted the way they reacted last weekend. (Also, by the way: Go outside, touch grass, it’s the weekend. Everybody in the industry was trading barbs on Twitter all weekend.) But this jumpiness is really interesting to me because we’re now a week out and I don’t think anybody’s feeling like the end is nigh like they were a week ago.

Kirsten Korosec: We have a really great story by one of our reporters, Tim Fernholz, who tries to unpack the psychosis around this here in the United States. He points to a number of reasons. And concludes — and I don’t want to conclude it for him, but I think that there’s one that rises more to the top than others. 

There’s concerns that these Chinese open weight models might have an implicit bias towards China, there’s another worry about security risks and guardrails. But there’s also a pretty big idea here, which is protectionism, and who is going to quote-unquote “win the race”? Is it going to be the US or China? And that seems to be driving a lot of what the fear is. 

I don’t know, Anthony, if you agree with that?

Anthony: I completely agree. I think the China aspect always adds this certain level of hysteria. And that’s not to say that people shouldn’t be concerned about how the U.S. stacks up against China across different industries. But it gets so amped up.

The other thing this reminds me of is the discussion around TikTok a few years ago. And again, it wasn’t that I thought that the concerns around TikTok were totally made up, but that the level of how panicked people got — it seems as soon as you add the word China to any discussion, things just ramp up dramatically.  And then in this case, it’s linked to this discussion about open [weights] and this idea that AI is so powerful and so dangerous that the only way we can control it is with these proprietary models from these American frontier companies. 

Obviously, most people saying this [have] reasons why they want to say that. David Sacks, who was the AI czar for the Trump administration [and] now has a different role in the Trump administration, was shouting on X about how, “I can’t believe people are opposing data centers, we’re tying ourselves in knots, there’s too much regulation.” And so it’s a way to argue for the positions that they already had around AI. “My gosh, if China beats us, that’s unthinkable, so you have to do what I want to do anyway.”

Kirsten: Right, and if you were to put across-the-board bans on Chinese open weight models — I’m not saying that there aren’t real concerns here, but let’s just play that out. If we were to do that, it would benefit models created by OpenAI, for instance, and it would force enterprises to use those as opposed to using models like Kimi.

So you really have to ask the question: Are we accelerating and ensuring that Americans win the AI race, or are we ensuring that certain frontier labs do better than others?

Sean: At this point, we should say a lot of this discussion really got kicked off by the head of strategic futures at OpenAI, Dean Ball, who was the first one to come out with this really long post mentioning some of these concerns.

Part of me thinks the reaction to this was because people disagreed with what Dean wrote. Part of me also thinks the reaction was driven by the fact that he kind of just said the thing out loud. He basically said the US should create regulatory FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — and muck up the ability for these open weight models to compete with the US. [Ball later backed away from this argument.]

And to me, I think you can read in some of the responses from folks, like, “You’re not supposed to say that out loud, Dean.”

The cyclospora outbreak affecting produce from Taylor Farms de Mexico has sickened over 1,600 people across five states, including Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. It’s one in a long line of severe produce outbreaks, but this time, I’m reconsidering how I approach food safety, given that the greens meant to nourish us continue to pose contamination risks. 

Over the last year and a half, I’ve used my Gardyn Studio, a hydroponic growing system, to grow my own produce in my small NYC apartment. I’ve harvested arugula, kale, lettuce, peppers, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, herbs and edible flowers, even throughout the winter — and, more importantly, I’ve had full control over the safety of my produce.

What to know about the 2026 cyclospora outbreak

Cyclospora is transmitted through food and water contaminated with the parasite, with symptoms typically manifesting approximately 1 week after exposure, though cases can range from two to 14 days or longer. The 2026 numbers represent a significant increase from the 249 cases reported in the US during the same period last year.

According to The Cleveland Clinic, symptoms of cyclospora infection often include sudden watery stools and even explosive diarrhea. Other common symptoms include:

• Stomach cramps 
• Bloating, increased gas and burping
• Nausea
• Unintentional weight loss
• Loss of appetite
• Extreme fatigue or weakness

While home-growing your produce doesn’t eliminate all food safety risks, it can eliminate the specific contamination risks present in mass industrial distribution systems and exposure to pesticides. Given these risks, many are looking for ways to bypass mass distribution entirely. This is why I started using the Gardyn Studio.

Nasha Addarich Martinez/CNET

Why I switched to the Gardyn Studio

The Gardyn Studio is a compact, 4.5-foot hydroponic tower with 16 growing slots, LED grow lights and a mobile app that manages your growing from start to finish. Having used it for over a year, I have a clear sense of its benefits and shortcomings.

I appreciate how self-sufficient the device is: You insert the pods, set the lighting schedule, add water and plant food, and refresh the tank every few weeks. Other than that, the plants pretty much grow on their own. Not every pod is a success, though. In every cycle, at least two pods fail to grow. While Gardyn will send replacement pods, you will need the Gardyn Nursery (a separate $80 device) to grow the sprouts before you can insert them into the Studio.

I’ve found the harvesting time to be quick. My arugula reaches maturity in about three to four weeks. The Kale takes about five weeks. In both cases, the taste and quality are unsurprisingly better than store-bought greens.

The Gardyn Studio costs $579 and is great for small spaces. If you have a larger home, you can also consider the Gardyn Home ($899), which fits 30 growing slots, compared to the 16 on the Studio.

There’s also an optional membership that costs between $25 and $39 a month or $259 a year, which includes monthly credits you can use to buy more plants and access to Kelby, the AI gardener that will automate watering cycles and lighting based on your specific plants’ life cycles and the local environment. It also sends push notifications to the Gardyn app to alert you when to add water, add plant food or harvest.

Last year, a CNET Survey found that US adults who shop for groceries waste an average of $125 a month on food that’s not cooked or eaten. That’s $1,500 a year. I rarely waste food grown in the Gardyn since I harvest it as needed, so I rarely end up with excess greens wilting away in the fridge.

Gardyn specs at a glance

The pros and cons

While I use my Gardyn year-round, there are things to consider before committing to it. The upfront cost of $579 puts the Gardyn Studio in the same category as high-end kitchen appliances, but the benefits of growing my own produce at home and no longer having to buy it make it worth it to me.

Pros:

• Eliminates contamination risks
• Compact design that fits in small spaces
• Minimal maintenance (no soil or gardening skills required)
• Responsive customer service for pod replacements
• Reduced pesticide exposure

Cons:

• High upfront costs
• Some pods fail to grow
• Ongoing pod and nutrient costs
• No ability to grow root vegetables

For those without access to hydroponic systems

Nasha Addarich Martínez/CNET

Growing your produce at home is still valuable, even at a smaller scale. Windowsill herb gardens require minimal equipment and investment. My first home garden was in a 10-inch planter, where I grew cilantro, basil and parsley, which I put on my windowsill.

Buying from local farms and building relationships with local farmers’ markets establishes direct supply chains from the source, without the middlemen (distribution centers). Inquiring about produce sourcing at your local supermarket creates incentives for transparency and regional cultivation. These approaches won’t prevent every outbreak, but they reduce dependence on centralized supply chains and create accountability between producers and consumers.

Food safety doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have to be a luxury. It does, however, require deliberate choices about where food originates and who controls its cultivation. The Gardyn Studio is one option among many, and the one that works for my lifestyle and home. What matters most is recognizing that alternatives to mass food systems exist.

Nasha Addarich Martínez

Managing Editor

Nasha is a Managing Editor for CNET, overseeing our sleep and wellness verticals. She is a nutrition, mental health, fitness and sleep science enthusiast. Her passion for mindful and holistic practices transcends her personal life and profoundly influences her editorial approach, as she weaves evidence-based insights with practical advice to inspire readers to lead healthier, more balanced lives. Throughout her career, she’s covered various topics including financial services, technology, travel and wellness.

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The European answer to TBPN is here and ready to go live five days a week, starting June 27. 

Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers first launched the London-based European Technology Network (ETN) last October, breaking down tech trends and news during a two-day-a-week live stream. Right now, the show is live-streamed on X and YouTube and has garnered more than 5 million views.

On Monday, the network announced a $1.6 million seed round from top players in the media ecosystem, including Powerhouse Capital, Axel Springer SE (which owns Business Insider and Politico), the popular media publication LadBible, and angel investors from OpenAI and DeepMind. With this fresh capital, the network is announcing its largest expansion yet. 

It’s now moving into a big studio in Kings Cross (where all the hot London AI startups are situated), expanding the team (right now of just eight), launching a newsletter, and is, starting today, moving into a five-day-a-week live show schedule, which will soon see Knight and Chambers interview the likes of George Robson (a partner at Sequoia) and Rishi Sunak (former UK Prime Minister and senior advisor to Anthropic and Microsoft). 

Speaking to TechCrunch, Knight and Chambers said ETN has already become a hot stop on the press tour for European startups — they’ve spoken to the founder of Syntheisa, the CFO of Legora, the founder of Granola, and Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s first AI Minister. They’ve even had American investors stop by the show when they are in town, including one from Andreessen Horowitz.

“ETN was born out of a gaping hole in the industry,” Chambers told TechCrunch. “It’s centered around pace.” He said the current media ecosystem in the UK cannot keep up with how fast the tech scene is moving. For example, so far this year, London startups have raised $14.7 billion according to Dealroom. Six companies have raised more than $500 million: Wayve, Superintelligence, ElevenLabs, Recursive, Ineffable Intelligence, and Isomorphic Labs, the latter three of which were founded by DeepMind alumni.

“These are things that have never happened in Europe before,” Chambers continued, referring to the speed at which capital is flowing through the ecosystem. As the show became more popular, Chambers said they were getting around 70 pitches a week from guests looking to come on the show. They would try and cram 12 interviews into two hours, twice a week, but eventually it got too much. “We needed an outlet that could move at the pace of that,” he said of both the interest in the show and how fast Europe’s tech ecosystem is moving, “which is the reason we’re going from two days a week to five days a week.” 

The five-day format will look quite similar to the two-day format. There will be a live show from 12 p.m. UK time to 3 p.m., breaking down trending stories, and then for two hours, they will have guests on the show talking about whatever they want. Chambers said they also want to start hosting debates, roundtables, and a Shark Tank-style pitching session on the show.

“We want to make it as useful as we can for the ecosystem,” Chambers said. “There needs to be more discourse around AI in Europe. There needs to be more discourse around venture capital and cash flowing into the ecosystem. There needs to be more discourse around the amazing things that are happening in the tech ecosystem, and our role is to be the stage in which people can shout about all the amazing things they’re doing.” 

The show makes its money from ad dollars, like most media publications, and big-name sponsors already include prediction market Polymarket, blockchain company Base, and the AI audio darling ElevenLabs. 

When asked about the influence TBPN has had on them, Knight and Chambers said they indeed do look at John Coogan and Jordi Hays, founders of TBPN (which recently sold to OpenAI for what some say was a nine-figure sum), as pioneers of this new tech media ecosystem. The show became a place for tech guests to appear and chat with friendly faces, announcing new product releases, hires, or funding news. “My thinking was, if we can have an ITV and a BBC, why wouldn’t we have a regional version of this?” Chambers continued. 

Europe is a big place, though, with more than 40 different countries and over 200 languages spoken (24 of which are recognized by the European Union). Chambers said that although ETN will report from London, he and Knight are making an effort to bring on guests from across the continent. Aside from bringing guests into the studio, they also travel to the hottest tech conferences around Europe. For example, they’ve broadcast from the Panathenaea Conference in Athens and from inside the Louvre in Paris for the RAISE AI Summit. 

“You have all these different cultures, these different minds coming together and creating different products,” Chambers said. “You get a taste of what makes [Europe] a superpower.” 

With all this, they said they would never turn an American founder away should they want to come on the show. “It’s a European technology network, but we think there’s massive [global] opportunities,” Chambers said. Knight added to that, noting how often conversations pit the European tech ecosystem against that of the U.S. 

“We are globally optimistic,” Knight said. “We are pushing global prosperity from Europe. Wherever you want to go and build your company, wherever is the best place to go and build that company, go and do that, and we will shout for you to go and do that.” 

He and Chambers also don’t necessarily see themselves as journalists; rather, they consider themselves tech insiders curious about what is going on and why. They also don’t see themselves as replacing traditional media and instead intend to work in tandem with those publications. “We rely on traditional media,” Chambers said, adding that is how they find much of the news that they to talk about on ETN. 

Overall, the duo hopes to help document the stories coming from the new wave of European success, from ElevenLabs in London to Lovable in Stockholm, to help the upcoming generation understand that technology is one way to drive a nation forward.

Discussing the impact of European success stories, Chambers said, “It riles up the next generation to the point where it’s no longer cool to finish university and go into banking or consulting. People want to leave university and go straight into building a startup, and I think that’s an amazing thing.”

As the worlds of networking and security increasingly collide, the role of network engineers is also evolving. IT teams are now on the frontlines of an organization’s cybersecurity, monitoring what’s happening across traffic, users, devices to spot issues and threats early, and act before they escalate.

When network and security architectures are integrated well, complexity decreases while performance increases, security gets stronger and latency lowers; and overall, day-to-day operations become simpler.