Engineering · 2026-04-15
On "sovereign-by-default"
We use the phrase enough that it deserves a definition. Here is what we mean by it, and what we don't.
The phrase appears in the lab's manifesto, in product positioning, and on this site's front page. It is not a slogan we picked up from a deck. It is the constraint that determines how we build.
Sovereign-by-default means: an organisation can run our software end-to-end without any of its data, prompts, model weights, vector indices, or operational metadata leaving its jurisdiction, its network, or its legal control — and that this is the default configuration, not an enterprise tier.
That sentence does a lot of work. Three pieces matter.
Default, not opt-in. The sovereign path is the well-trodden one: documented first, supported first, tested first. An admin who installs the software the way the README tells them to ends up with a sovereign deployment. The hosted SaaS variant is the variant — when there is one — not the baseline. This is the inverse of how most US-origin AI infrastructure is shaped.
Jurisdiction, not just network. A workload running on a Kubernetes cluster in Frankfurt, on hardware operated by a US-headquartered cloud, is not sovereign in the sense we mean. The data is in EU geography, but the contractual and statutory pathway to access it runs through US discovery law. Sovereignty under our definition requires that the legal, contractual, and operational stack all sit inside the same regime. In practice, this rules out the major US hyperscalers as substrate; it does not rule out US-headquartered software shipped on-prem.
End-to-end. A sovereign application atop a non-sovereign LLM API is not sovereign. This is the most common pattern we encounter in the wild — a careful EU-hosted control plane that calls out to a non-EU model vendor for inference, and now the prompt-text that just left the cluster is governed by another regime's law. Hermes, our LLM gateway, exists primarily so that this hand-off has somewhere disciplined to land.
What "sovereign-by-default" does not mean: it does not mean closed-source, it does not mean European-only customers, it does not mean refusing to talk to non-EU model providers, and it does not mean we believe the EU is the only legitimate jurisdiction. It means our defaults serve users for whom the question matters.
We expect that group to grow.