Dr Arthur PB Laudrain is the Team Lead and a Senior Researcher in Cyber Security at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich. Arthur specialises in election interference, disinformation, subversion, and military cyber operations. Previously, he was the Richard Lounsbery US-France Security Fellow at Stanford CISAC, and a Research Associate in Cyber Diplomacy at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He is a member of the Management Committee of NetSec (Networking European Security Knowledge), a European Cooperation in Science and Technology project. He also maintains affiliations with Stanford CISAC and King's College London. Arthur has a wide professional experience spanning think-tanks, consulting, and government. He obtained his DPhil from the University of Oxford (Wolfson College), and holds an MA (London) and LLM (Leiden). He is an Associate of King's College (AKC) and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

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Great Power competition over artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping digital interdependencies, yet we lack a systematic account of how middle-ground and European states align with rival AI ecosystems. This paper extends a typology of middle-ground cyber statecraft to AI governance, testing whether four informal alignment configurations (Strategic Alignment, Sovereignty Assertion, Selective Engagement and Pragmatism) accommodate European cases. I argue that AI platform adoption, including cloud-AI procurement, the selection of foundation model, and compute partnerships constitutes an alignment mechanism that operates beneath formal diplomatic positioning, and hardens over time with path-dependent lock-in. The EU AI Act sets a common regulatory floor, but member states are diverging on the infrastructure choices that actually constitute alignment, such as France's sovereign AI industrial policy (Mistral), Germany's mixed posture (Aleph Alpha) and smaller EU states defaulting to US hyperscalers. Drawing on neoclassical realism (Ripsman, Taliaferro, and Lobell 2016), I treat elite threat perception, coalition configuration and institutional capacity as domestic mediators explaining why states under similar systemic pressure select different AI platform strategies. The analysis pairs European cases with a subset of the original middle-ground sample, including India and the UAE, to enable direct comparison across both settings. The paper contributes to the field with a theoretically grounded account of how infrastructure choices create alignment in a fragmented digital order.

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