The four tracked areas

The four areas are where the answers diverge: each area has its own instruments, its own vocabulary and its own way of failing, and an argument that holds in one collapses in the next.

The seam where they meet

Under the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, a cloud estate could reach the highest assurance level and still run entirely on imported accelerators, because those levels test who owns it, who operates it and whose law governs it, and stop before who made the parts. A defence contract cannot do the same thing, because SAFE puts a cost ceiling on non-European content at Article 16(10) and the ceiling binds.

In issue.zero that one difference explained the gap between two areas. Defence and space ran net +5 while policy and law ran net -1, in the same month and out of the same public purse, and what separated them was whether a European content rule was attached to the money.

Read the four areas together and the pattern is legible: where a European supplier exists, European money reaches it; where one does not, the money buys the capability from whoever has it, and no condition is attached requiring anything else. Policy decides whether such a condition exists, compute is where its absence costs the most, defence is where one exists and works, and industry is where the supplier either appears or does not.

What each one covers

01 Policy and law covers what actually binds, from when, and which of the four sovereignty questions each instrument declines to ask, read at the provisions of the AI Act, the Cloud and AI Development Act, Chips Act 2.0 and the Data Act rather than in the press releases.

02 Compute and infrastructure covers cloud contracts and their exit terms, supercomputer and AI factory procurements, datacentre builds and the accelerators inside all of it, where a sovereignty claim usually describes the building and the fact that matters is usually the chip.

03 Defence and space covers capability programmes, primes and suppliers, launch and the ground segment, secure connectivity and joint procurement. It is the one area where European content is a binding condition rather than an aspiration.

04 Industry, investment and R&D covers state aid, research programmes, plant and capacity, and the ownership of the firms receiving all of it: where public money goes, and who owns the recipient once the establishment test has been satisfied.

Each area page sets out what the area covers and which instruments govern it, and shows the area's two numbers on the index. The scoring is explained at Method and scoring, and the words the instruments use, along with what each one declines to test, are set out in the Dictionary.