Of the German AI companies that publicly name a provider, around 53 percent are dependent on US companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft or AWS. Another 43 percent say they are currently developing their own models. This emerges from an analysis by the European AI platform GreenPT. For the analysis, 514 publicly identifiable German AI companies were examined, of which 221 disclose which AI model they use.
German companies rely on US models
Overall, German AI companies are still heavily dependent on US providers. Among the 185 companies that name the provider directly on their website, the dependency value even rises to around 60 percent. Mistral, the only frontier laboratory based in the EU, only reaches around one in ten companies that provide information about their AI model. Compared to other European countries, Germany is in the middle range when it comes to the level of US dependence and the use of its own models. A separate model includes those that have been trained or developed themselves.
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OpenAI’s AI models are used most frequently by German AI companies – directly or via Azure. The prevalence among companies that disclose their use is around 41 percent, slightly below the European average. Google and Vertex follow with around 20 percent, Anthropic with 18 percent – both are above the European average. Mistral comes in at around ten percent, which is slightly above the European average of around eight percent. Only Microsoft Copilot and Meta Llama are represented even less.
Data reveals clear sovereignty gap
There are clear differences depending on the industry. Sensitive sectors therefore predominantly rely on their own models. In the areas of health and biotech, around 85 percent of our own solutions are developed, and in the manufacturing sector it is around 71 percent. Companies in the areas of cyber, data and infrastructure prefer to use their own or open source solutions – the US share is lower than average. Software and API-intensive areas such as legal, human resources, finance and edtech, on the other hand, rely more heavily on US models. Retail, media and marketing have high direct OpenAI usage.
The analysis sees the central finding in the large sovereignty gap: according to GreenPT, 173 of the 514 companies examined are actively marketing an EU or Germany data residency or on-premise deployment. Of these, 72 still use a proprietary model from the USA. So you communicate sovereignty, but technically you still rely on US providers. This is particularly pronounced in the areas of law, HR, administration, customer service and finance – i.e. where the pressure for compliance is highest. The evaluation once again shows how dependent German companies are on US tech companies – including in the area of AI.
