“European sovereign AI” is on every vendor’s slide. But the model’s nationality is the wrong question: what makes generative AI sovereign is where it’s served and whose laws bind the provider – and that’s exactly what sovereignty washing hides. A European-branded model running on a non-EU cloud is still one lawful order away from a foreign government, no matter which data centre stores the bytes.
This lightning talk is a field guide to real sovereignty for LLMs. We map the spectrum – from convenient-but-exposed to genuinely sovereign – show how to spot the washing before you sign, and walk through the honest trade-offs (cost, quality, availability) we hit while building the backend for our startup, lynq.ing.
The takeaway: the handful of questions that separate sovereign from sovereignty-washed.
