How Stav grades sovereignty

The Stav Sovereignty Ladder.

“Sovereign AI” is usually a marketing word. We made it a graded scale. Every inference endpoint on Stav resolves to a level from L0 to L4 — answering, in order: where your inference runs, who runs it, who owns them, and whether anyone outside Europe holds strings. The level travels with every request you make.

L0Foreign jurisdiction L1European-hosted L2European operation L3Sovereign L4Full sovereignty

01Where does it run?Location of the metal and the data.→ rung L1 02Who runs it?Operation, certification, supply-chain transparency.→ rung L2 03Who owns them?Ownership and control of the operator itself.→ rung L3 04Any strings attached?No third-country lever over the stack — at all.→ rung L4

Each question is a rung. Reaching a rung means answering that question — and every question below it — with evidence, not adjectives. A provider that answers none of them is L0, and says so plainly.

The five rungs

L4 · Full sovereigntyNo strings attached

Full supply-chain control, no third-country interference — sovereignty with nothing left to trust on faith.

Everything in L1–L3, held directly — not through an exemption.
A qualification that certifies sovereignty, not just security — one that requires the operator to be beyond the reach of foreign law. SecNumCloud (France) is the bar today. Strong security certificates like ISO 27001 count at L2; they do not count here.
Nothing outside Europe can be switched off underneath them. Open-source software a European operator can fork and maintain itself is fine, whoever wrote it. A licence that can be revoked, or a subscription that can be cancelled, is not — the stack stops when it is withdrawn. Open-weight models close the same gap for the model itself.

L3 · SovereignWho owns them4 providers today →

EU/EEA ownership and control of the operator — the entity running your inference cannot be directed from outside Europe.

Everything in L1–L2.
The operator is owned in the EU/EEA.
No other country controls the company, and the people with administrator access to the running service are based in the EU/EEA — no out-of-hours support desk in another jurisdiction can reach your data.

L2 · European operationWho runs it1 provider today →

European operation with third-country independence — certified, transparent, and organisationally separated.

Everything in L1.
EU-based staff run the service. Non-EU parts of the company are kept separate.
Certified security (“substantial” or better — ISO 27001 counts), a maintained list of software components, and the non-EU ones identified and their risk assessed.

L1 · European-hostedWhere it runs4 providers today →

EU/EEA location — your prompts are processed and stored on infrastructure physically in the Union (or a GDPR-adequacy jurisdiction).

Customer data processed and stored on EU/EEA-located infrastructure.
The serving infrastructure itself sits in the EU/EEA.
The operator cannot be compelled by a third country to conceal unpatched vulnerabilities.

L0 · Foreign jurisdictionBelow the ladder18 providers today →

Foreign jurisdiction — served under third-country law, outside EU/EEA guarantees. Useful, popular, and marked plainly: routed-commercial endpoints live here.

Does not meet the L1 location criteria (or CLOUD Act / FISA 702 exposure undermines them).
Still first-class on Stav: opt-in per router, never routed to by default, and every request logs the level it was served at.

A provider we have not graded yet shows as Not yet assessed — a data-quality state, never a rung. It is treated as unproven, not as sovereign.

01How we classify

Our assessment, versioned — never a marketing claim.

The level is Stav’s own assessment. It is not a certificate, and a provider cannot buy a better grade.

We grade from facts we track for every provider: where the servers are, which law applies to the operator, exposure to the US CLOUD Act and FISA 702, published certifications, and data-residency commitments. Each rung is a checklist. A provider gets the highest rung where it meets every point. If we don’t know something, it counts as not met.

The checklist is versioned (today: 3.0), and every grade records the version it was made under — so when the criteria change, you can see whether a grade predates the change. A provider we have not yet worked through carries a coarse starting grade from its location, marked seed-1, until we do.

Where we have graded a provider, its page shows the full checklist: which points are met, which we have not established, and the source behind each one — national business registries for ownership, the operator’s own published certificates and contracts for the rest. Points we have not researched are shown as unknown rather than as failures.

02The coming EU legislation

CADA is writing the definition of sovereign cloud.

Proposed3 June 2026
Triloguethrough late 2026
Final textexpected 2027 or later
Stav gradesre-checked as the text moves

The ladder is aligned to the EU Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), proposed by the European Commission on 3 June 2026 as the cloud-and-AI pillar of the European Technological Sovereignty Package. CADA defines four Union assurance levels for sovereign cloud — and they are levels of control, not just data residency: an “EU region” checkbox satisfies only the first level, while exposure to the US CLOUD Act or FISA 702 structurally caps a US-parented operator near the bottom of the ladder. Public-sector buyers are expected to procure against a chosen level; official recognition at a level comes only after a Member-State audit.

CADA is a proposal, not law. Trilogue negotiations are expected through late 2026, final text is unlikely before late 2027, and the criteria may move. That is exactly why our ladder is proposal-tracking: L1–L4 follow the proposal’s four assurance levels as we read them today, versioned so grades can be re-checked when the text changes. Two deliberate choices are our own: we read “Union” as EU/EEA (Stav is Norwegian — EEA-located, EEA-owned), and we added an explicit L0 rung so every endpoint resolves to a level instead of hiding the non-sovereign ones.

Stav sovereignty levels are Stav’s indicative self-assessment of where an operator would qualify under the proposed EU Cloud and AI Development Act. They are not an official Member-State or EUCS recognition. CADA is a European Commission proposal (June 2026); criteria may change.

03In the product

Not a badge — the routing spine.

The level is not decoration on a marketing page; it is the value the platform actually routes, logs, and proves against:

Every response declares it. Each API response carries an X-Stav-Sovereignty-Level header, and every request is logged with the level it was served at plus the criteria version in force — per-request compliance evidence, not an annual attestation.
Floors, not preferences. A team sets a minimum level; routers, API keys, and app policies can only tighten it — never loosen it. If nothing meets the floor, the request is refused rather than quietly served below it.
Every operator is graded. The inference-provider registry shows each operator’s level, jurisdiction, residency, and legal exposure — including the non-sovereign providers, marked plainly.

Browse the providers by level, or see the model catalogue for what each level can serve.