Europe wants control of its technology. What about your personal AI?

On November 3, 2026, Nextcloud announced that six German states (Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Rhineland-Palatinate) can now offer their schools a collaboration platform built on Nextcloud and run by IONOS in German data centers. Other states can join later.

Nobody has to use it. Schools can stay on Microsoft or Google if they want. What changed is that they now have a European option they can actually buy.

That’s how most of Europe’s push for digital sovereignty looks up close. It’s less about banning American software than about not being stuck with it. Governments are asking that question about email and video calls. You can ask it about something much more personal: the AI you talk your decisions through with, and the record of those conversations it keeps.

What Germany, France, and the Netherlands are doing

Germany: open-source email and school clouds

The school cloud isn’t Germany’s first move. Schleswig-Holstein, the country’s northernmost state, finished moving its administration’s email off Microsoft Exchange and Outlook in 2025. A state spokesperson told the European Commission that meant more than 44,000 mailboxes and 110 million emails and calendar entries, now on Open-Xchange and Thunderbird.

It wasn’t painless. Heise reported that staff complained about downtime and delayed email, and the state’s digital minister, Dirk Schrödter, admitted mistakes in a letter to every state employee. The state finished the move anyway.

France: one video tool for every state service

In January 2026, the French government announced that Visio, a video-conferencing tool built by its own digital agency, will be rolled out to every state service by 2027, with the stated aim of ending the use of non-European tools. Visio is hosted by Outscale, a Dassault Systèmes subsidiary, on infrastructure certified under the national cybersecurity agency’s SecNumCloud label. When the plan was announced, Visio had 40,000 regular users and was being rolled out to 200,000 public servants. It’s one of the government’s own work tools in La Suite numérique.

The Netherlands: an exit plan before any cloud

On July 3, 2026, the Dutch cabinet adopted a revised cloud policy for central government. Before a ministry makes substantial use of a cloud service, it has to weigh how dependent it would become on one supplier and whether that supplier falls partly under a jurisdiction outside the EU or EEA. It also has to write a detailed exit plan that covers both a planned move away and the day the service is suddenly unavailable or has already gone down. Existing cloud use that doesn’t meet the new rules has four years to comply.

Most Europeans want this too

The European Commission’s Digital Decade 2026 Special Eurobarometer, published in June 2026 from a survey run in February and March, suggests governments aren’t the only ones who want this.

Those numbers are about digital technology in general, not AI assistants. They do show that the question of who controls everyday software has moved well beyond government IT departments.

Your AI conversations are a bigger dependency than your email

Governments are moving email, documents, and video calls. For many people, the most revealing thing they now hand to a tech company is a conversation with an AI.

Think about what goes into one. Whether to take the job in Munich. What you really think about a friendship that’s drifting. A business idea you haven’t told anyone about. An assistant with memory keeps the useful parts, so next time you don’t have to explain yourself from scratch. Over a year, that adds up to a detailed record of how you think.

With most AI assistants, that record is read and stored on the provider’s servers. Encryption protects it on the way there and while it’s stored, but to answer you the model has to read your words, and that happens wherever the model runs. Our explainer on private intelligence goes into why “encrypted” doesn’t mean “local”, and on-device vs cloud AI covers the trade-offs.

GDPR helps, but only with data a company holds

GDPR gives you real rights over personal data a company holds. You can ask to see it, correct it, have it erased, or take a copy to another service. Regulators are also working out how those rules apply to AI. In December 2024, the European Data Protection Board said in Opinion 28/2024 that an AI model trained on personal data can’t simply be assumed to be anonymous.

Those rights work by request, though. You write to the company, it checks who you are, and it has up to a month to reply, longer for complicated requests. And a request can only reach data the company actually has.

So the way an app is built matters as much as the law. If an assistant reads and stores your conversations on your phone, the company behind it never has a copy for you to ask about. You delete things yourself, and they’re gone. Merrin’s privacy policy says it directly: “We do not keep a server-side copy that you need to request separately.”

An exit plan for your personal AI

The Dutch rules work as a test for anyone. Before you trust an AI assistant with months of your thinking, ask it the three things a Dutch ministry now has to ask about a cloud service.

1. What happens when the service isn’t there? Turn on airplane mode and try it. If the assistant stops working, everything it does for you depends on someone else’s servers being up and reachable.
2. Where are your words read, and whose rules apply? “Encrypted” and “GDPR compliant” don’t answer this. The privacy policy should say where processing happens and which other companies are involved.
3. Can you leave? Can you delete everything yourself, without emailing anyone? Can you take your history with you, and in what form?

Our private intelligence explainer has a longer checklist, including what to ask about memory.

Where Merrin fits

Merrin is a private personal intelligence for iOS and Android. You talk or type about what’s on your mind, it remembers what matters, and it turns your conversations into a journal you can search later.

It isn’t a European sovereign-cloud product, and we won’t pretend it is. It takes a different route to the same goal: for its core features, there’s no cloud service in the middle. Against the three questions above:

When there’s no connection. The AI models run on your phone. You download them once, and after that conversation, journaling, search, and memory keep working in airplane mode.

Where your words are read. On your phone. Conversations, journal entries, memories, voice transcripts, and insights are designed to stay there during normal use, and speech recognition runs on the device by default. Merrin does go online for a few things: downloading models, purchases, configuration checks, and diagnostics if you allow them. The privacy policy lists every one.

Leaving. There’s no account to close. You can delete a single memory or conversation, or wipe everything from settings, and it’s gone from your phone at once. Encrypted backups go wherever you choose to save them, protected by a recovery key we never see. The limit is that a backup only restores into Merrin. To move your words into another app, you can copy any journal entry out as text.

You can also see what Merrin remembers about you, and edit or delete any memory. We wrote about why that matters.

You can talk to Merrin in English, German, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, and the app itself is translated into all five. Voice conversations in the four languages other than English depend on which AI model your phone can run. Dutch isn’t one of the five.

Most of this is free: unlimited conversations, text and voice, the journal, memory you can edit, search by meaning, and encrypted backup. Pro adds insights into how your views change over time, weekly reflections, more perspectives, and a larger AI model. The pricing section has the details.

What on-device AI can’t do

A model that fits on a phone is smaller than one in a data center. It’s good at conversations about your own life, and weaker on general knowledge and long chains of reasoning. Older or low-memory phones may get slower replies or fewer features. The models take up storage, and the first download needs a connection.

Keeping your data on your phone also makes the phone the thing to protect. If it’s lost, or its backups go somewhere you didn’t expect, that’s your problem to manage rather than a provider’s. Our on-device vs cloud AI comparison covers these trade-offs one at a time.

The personal version

Europe’s governments are deciding they want options, and a way out, for the software they depend on. You can make the same call about the AI that holds your thinking.

If you’d like that to be Merrin, it’s coming to iOS and Android. Join the waitlist and we’ll email you when it’s out.