Eclipse wants companies to be free to switch AI providers. Today, doing so can mean a costly rebuild.

If you rely too heavily on one AI provider, switching can mean rebuilding workloads and moving data while you face untangling integrations. A new vendor-neutral group aims to help organizations keep their options open. That’s the goal of the Eclipse Foundation, which announced the formation of the Sovereign AI Foundation on Wednesday.

The new body will serve as a vendor-neutral initiative to help member organizations manage AI platform lock-in, monitor cyber risk, and maintain control of their data. The group has been active on Eclipse’s project site since July.

An initial community of 17 organizations comes together to advance AI sovereignty through open-source collaboration.

The foundation’s mission is to help organizations “navigate AI dependencies” (as in dependence on any single AI service, not control over where application dependencies get tied to a particular model’s DNA… although, by extension, that too), where dependence can limit a software engineering team’s ability to control where data is processed, choose which technologies to use, or change direction as costs, requirements, and provider terms evolve.

A core rationale for AI sovereignty control

Executive director at the Eclipse Foundation, Mike Milinkovich, tells The New Stack that the risk of not adopting an open approach to AI sovereignty control depends on how deeply AI is embedded in an organization and how difficult the underlying systems are to change.

“The deeper the dependency, the greater the potential risk,” Milinkovich says. “But however embedded the underlying systems are, the costs show up in predictable places: higher prices that make switching difficult, and the challenge of rebuilding integrations, moving data and workloads, documenting systems after the fact, compliance delays, and operational disruption.”

He underlines his point and says part of the Sovereign AI Foundation’s work will be to “compare real-world experiences” and build stronger evidence around those risks.

“The deeper the dependency, the greater the potential risk. But however embedded the underlying systems are, the costs show up in predictable places.”

The Sovereign AI Foundation will work to give members an open forum to understand AI dependencies, compare experiences, and develop practical guidance for decisions about data, models, infrastructure, and operations.

Can we move beyond the AI hype-cycle now?

Acknowledging what he calls the pre-IPO hype cycle around the promotion of frontier models, Milinkovich calls for a concerted focus on where the real value in AI lies: enterprise and industrial applications that deliver measurable business value, without vendor lock-in.

“AI will not deliver on its potential if it is based entirely on a dependence on a relatively small number of providers for critical AI models, platforms, and infrastructure,” Milinkovich insists. “As AI becomes part of the systems organizations rely on every day, that dependence can leave them with too little visibility into where their data goes, which models use it, or how easily they can switch when costs, terms, or requirements change.”

Choice, control & freedom of action

He asks us to understand how far the Sovereign AI Foundation will go to find practical ways to “preserve choice and control,” with a vision of delivering open-source and open-weight solutions that allow freedom of action.

As admirable and philanthropic as this sounds — and coming from a Brussels-based foundation whose founding members are mostly European — is there any America-first idealism here, given that open-weight Chinese models are also openly available?

“This is not about China or any single provider. The same questions apply to AI technologies from the United States, Europe, Asia, or anywhere else,” confirms Milinkovich. “Closed models can limit visibility, while access to model weights alone does not provide the transparency, control, or the independent governance that organizations may need. The real question for our members is whether they can understand, adapt, and, if necessary, replace the systems they depend on.”

17 founding members

As noted above, this initiative launches with 17 participating organizations spanning technology, industry, research, and the open source community: France’s CEA LIST, Thales and Kentyou, Germany’s EclipseSource, Open Elements, TypeFox, Vector Informatik, and Bosch, Italy’s Engineering Ingegneria Informatica and Eurotech, Sweden’s Ericsson, India’s Infosys, Belgium’s KU Leuven, Japan’s Renesas Electronics, Malaysia’s The IO Foundation… and then there’s North Carolina’s Red Hat, and the University of York in the UK.

The Sovereign AI Foundation focuses on five areas:

Mapping real-world use cases: Building a shared view of how members deploy, evaluate, and pilot open-source AI.

Assessing technologies and trends: Monitoring developments across models, evaluation frameworks, inference infrastructure, and regulation.

Developing practical resources: Producing whitepapers, blueprints, landscape analyses, and reference materials.

Building a peer community: Connecting organizations at every stage of open source AI adoption.

Translating research into action: Turning outcomes from Eclipse Foundation research initiatives, including EU-funded projects, into insights that members can apply.

A mission to tackle data control, cyber safety, or lock-in?

There’s a lot to unpack here in an organization only just out of the blocks; it begs the question whether the Sovereign AI Foundation will focus on data control challenges and efficiency, cyber safety, or platform lock-in challenges.

“It’s all three, and they reinforce one another,” Milinkovich says. “It is an efficiency issue if moving to a better or less expensive model requires rebuilding the workload. It is a security issue if organizations lack the visibility needed to assess risk. And it is a lock-in and resilience issue if critical operations become so tied to one provider that changing direction is costly or disruptive.”

“The need here is clearest wherever AI is used in systems with long lifecycles, demanding safety and security requirements, or sensitive data.”

He explains that “the specific needs vary”, so a manufacturer may need AI to keep operating when connectivity is limited, while a public agency may need to explain how an AI-supported decision was made.

“The need here is clearest wherever AI is used in systems with long lifecycles, demanding safety and security requirements, or sensitive data. That includes automotive, manufacturing, telecommunications, aerospace and defense, energy, and the public sector,” adds Milinkovich.

Interest will extend well beyond Europe

He confirms that the foundation’s initial participants do “reflect that mix”, as companies including Bosch, Vector, Renesas, Ericsson, and Thales put sovereignty high on the agenda. But he qualifies that dependence on critical AI technologies is a global concern, “so we expect interest well beyond Europe” in the weeks and months ahead.

Milinkovich offers a selection of still-forming use cases that he thinks are already solid.

EclipseSource is working with industrial customers on AI-enabled development tools like Eclipse Theia AI, where teams need flexibility over models and deployment.

The Open VSX Registry provides vendor-neutral access to thousands of extensions for a growing range of open source and AI-enabled development tools.

Eurotech is using Eclipse-governed projects to bring AI to the edge, where systems interact with physical equipment and must remain secure, reliable, and maintainable for years.

Eclipse LMOS, originally developed at Deutsche Telekom, supports production multi-agent systems at significant scale and underpins multiple global deployments today.

“Across these examples, the common approach is modularity: keeping models, infrastructure, and applications separate enough that one can change without rebuilding everything. Our job is to capture what works and turn it into guidance others can use,” affirmed Milinkovich.

The Sovereign AI Foundation team says that alongside the 17 founding members, additional organizations are in the process of joining, and it invites eligible Eclipse Foundation member organizations to participate.

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