E 777 — Digital Sovereignty After the AI Export Order

Digital Sovereignty Europe After the June AI Export Order

Amadeni AI's Delia Hallberg on switching models in hours, not months

One government letter can remove a model from the market. In June 2026 that stopped being hypothetical: a US licensing order covering advanced AI models led to those models being disabled for users worldwide, with a partial exemption arriving weeks later for a narrow set of US organisations. Delia Hallberg, co-founder of Amadeni AI, had been building model-agnostic from the start. She now treats it as a requirement rather than a preference — and digital sovereignty in Europe as a continuity problem rather than a values statement.

Part two of a two-part conversation with one of the German startups putting AI agents into mid-sized companies. Her framing is the operational one, and it is the reason this matters well beyond Germany: the models affected in June were new, so nothing was running on them yet. Imagine a model being withdrawn that is already deployed.

Top signals from this episode:

1. The target is switching models within hours, which is an architecture decision made long before the trigger arrives. The triggers she expects are not only political — she does not believe AI pricing stays where it is, and a price move is as real a reason to switch as a security report or a government letter.

2. What clients now ask for. In 2023 German hosting and data-protection language was comfort. Now clients say they want zero US services in their tooling and the ability to become independent from one day to the next. Her conclusion: this is business continuity, not sentiment.

3. Her preference for European products where they genuinely fit the purpose and the quality bar — paired with the harder principle that you never want a monopoly and you always want somewhere to switch to.

4. The mechanism that decides whether an AI layer can be built at all: the open interface. Without an API on the incumbent product, nobody can add automation. Clients arrive asking her to build an API for somebody else's closed software so they can connect it to Langdock, and she has to tell them it cannot be done.

Also covered: something a vibe coder built over a weekend is a prototype, not a product anyone should run a critical process on; which products are structurally exposed and which are not; the 70/30 shape where a standard product covers most of it and a small custom add-on covers the rest; why a project aiming at a 50 to 60 percent efficiency gain is