Private industry may have to lead a transatlantic cyber reset, French summit leader says

As political trust frays between Washington and parts of Europe, private industry may have to move faster than governments to keep transatlantic cyber cooperation on track. That was the core argument from Sébastien Garnault, founder of the CyberTaskForce and president of the Paris Cyber Summit, in a recent Cyber Focus interview focused on digital trust, market access and critical infrastructure security.

Garnault’s case was not that governments no longer matter. It was that they are not moving at the speed the moment demands. He described public-sector relationships as “very tense” and argued that businesses, facing the same threats and the same economic pressures on both sides of the Atlantic, may be better positioned to make practical progress now. “Maybe what we’ve done in the last decade and what we will do in the next decade don’t belong [to] government, but belongs to us,” he said, adding that if industry can align quickly enough, “the government will have no choice [but] to follow us.”

That argument sat at the center of a broader discussion about how the United States and Europe define secure technology markets differently. Garnault contrasted what he described as a U.S. “clean stack,” oriented around national-security exclusions such as Chinese technology, with a European “trusted stack,” which focuses more on whether a company complies with the standards of the market it wants to enter. 

For Garnault, that difference is not just semantic. It shapes which companies can participate in critical infrastructure markets and how allies cooperate when their threat perceptions are not identical. “The best way for us to cooperate with our allies is to use the market because the market is less political than national security,” Garnault said.

The urgency in Garnault’s argument was striking. He rejected the idea that the United States and Europe have years to work through these issues, saying instead, “I think we have weeks.” His preferred outcome was not a rupture, but a recalibration: “We can do a reset; we cannot afford a reboot.” 

That formulation captured the larger point of the conversation. For Garnault, the transatlantic relationship remains too strategically important to let political strain harden into economic and cyber separation. If governments are too slow or too constrained to act first, he suggested, industry should stop waiting and start building the terms of cooperation itself.

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