The Governance Gap: How the United States Dismantled AI Oversight and What It Means for Europe

Between January 2025 and March 2026, the United States executed a sequential dismantlement of civilian AI oversight across four documented regulatory steps: revocation of EO 14110, adoption of a DOD AI Strategy shifting from "responsible, equitable, traceable, governable" to "any lawful use, free from usage policy constraints," publication of a White House AI Framework preempting state-level AI regulation, and CIA-scale integration of frontier AI models across intelligence operations. This paper documents the sequence from consecutive primary U.S. government sources, maps the European regulatory gap, and identifies the absence of any bilateral EU-U.S. framework governing U.S. military and intelligence AI applications. EU AI Act Article 2(3) explicitly excludes military AI from civilian governance — a deliberate legislative choice that leaves the EU without any instrument to contest or seek redress for U.S. military AI applications with effects in Europe. Operation Epic Fury (February-April 2026) — 13,000 AI-assisted targets in 38 days under the "any lawful use" framework — constitutes the first large-scale empirical test of this architecture. No EU legal mechanism was triggered. The European policy window closes August 21, 2026 (Genesis IOC, EO 14363). All claims are classified as FACT (verifiable primary source) or INFERENCE (explicit logical deduction). Speculation excluded.