July 20, 2026
Open source or open season?
Soofi – Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models
Europe’s new “open” AI drops, and the comments instantly start a sovereignty slap-fight
TLDR: Soofi S is Europe’s new AI project aimed at giving companies and governments a more independent alternative, but it’s still in testing and not broadly available. The real drama is in the comments, where people are fighting over whether it’s genuinely open or just slick “sovereign AI” branding.
Europe has unveiled Soofi S, a new artificial intelligence model meant to be the first building block in a homegrown, more independent AI family. The pitch is big: a powerful system for business, government, research, and industry that can run on infrastructure Europe controls itself, with a focus on German and English tasks like document handling, coding, and company-specific tools. There’s just one tiny problem, according to the internet: people immediately started asking whether this thing is actually “open” at all.
That doubt became the main event. One commenter flat-out said, “I’m not seeing how this project is open source exactly,” basically accusing Soofi of serving up the word open with the same vibes as ChatGPT: free to use maybe, but not truly transparent. Another user brought receipts with an arXiv paper, arguing the more interesting story is Soofi’s speed and ability to handle huge amounts of text at once. So yes, while one side yelled “show us the openness”, the other side was busy saying, “actually, the performance is the headline.”
And then came the spice. One furious critic blasted the project’s lofty “digital value creation” language and turned the thread into a full-on roast. Another accused the whole thing of being basically Nvidia coaching with a sovereignty costume on, calling it a PR trick dressed up as European independence. Still, not everyone came with pitchforks: one supporter said it’s great to see more sovereign open-source models and a move away from central control. In other words, Soofi launched as a European AI project — and the comments turned it into a messy referendum on trust, branding, and whether “sovereign” is vision... or just very expensive marketing.
Key Points
- •The Soofi consortium introduced Soofi S as the first building block of an open European AI model family.
- •Soofi S is described as a 30B mixture-of-experts model trained on 27 trillion tokens, mainly for German and English text.
- •The project targets industrial AI use cases such as technical and regulatory documents, code generation, agentic systems, and company-specific applications.
- •Soofi is currently focused on practical testing with industry partners, and the model has not yet been generally released for direct public use.
- •The consortium also runs the OSFM workshop series and participates in conferences and trade fairs to discuss sovereign foundation models and European AI ecosystems.