Sovereign AI: your AI agents hosted in France, a deployment governed with regard to the GDPR

In brief

In brief — a sovereign AI is an artificial intelligence whose models, infrastructure and data remain under European jurisdiction. In practice, your AI agents run locally or are hosted in France (EU, GDPR); with local inference or SecNumCloud-qualified sovereign hosting, the architecture is designed to reduce exposure to extraterritorial laws such as the American Cloud Act, without that configuration alone guaranteeing immunity.

Why AI sovereignty has become a real issue

Almost all the major consumer AI services are published by American companies. Using them means routing your data through infrastructure subject to United States law. As long as it is drafts with nothing at stake, the risk is low. But as soon as an AI agent handles confidential information — customers' personal data, trade secrets, medical records, legal documents — the question of control becomes central. Who can access that data? Under which jurisdiction? What happens if the supplier changes its terms, raises its prices or closes a service?

Sovereignty answers those three concerns: confidentiality (your data cannot be read by a third party), compliance (you meet the GDPR without elaborate legal arrangements) and control (you do not depend on a foreign platform you do not govern).

The Cloud Act: why your data is not safe elsewhere

The Cloud Act is an American law passed in 2018. It allows the United States authorities to require an American provider to hand over the data it controls, wherever in the world it is stored — including in a data centre located in Europe. In other words, choosing the “European region” of an American host is not enough: what counts is the nationality of the provider, not only the location of the server. It is one of the reasons why the Court of Justice of the European Union's Schrems II ruling weakened, in 2020, transfers of personal data to the United States. A genuinely sovereign architecture aims to reduce that risk rather than remove it as a matter of principle: it requires checking, for the configuration chosen, whether any actor in the chain — contracting entity, provider, subcontractor, operator, holder of the encryption keys — is subject to an extraterritorial law. Until that check has been made and written down, immunity cannot be asserted.

GDPR: what compliance really demands

The GDPR does not, in itself, require your processing to be hosted in France. But it strictly frames transfers of personal data outside the European Union, which call for heavy and uncertain legal guarantees. Hosting in France simply removes that transfer problem. The regulation also requires data minimisation (processing only what is necessary), a clear legal basis, traceability of access and the ability to honour individuals' rights. Our agents are designed along these principles from the outset (privacy by design), which turns a regulatory constraint into a commercial argument towards your own customers.

Local inference or hosting in France: two sovereign routes

There are two ways to guarantee sovereignty, and we offer both:

In both cases, the deployment objective is that processing and access stay within the European Union. The absence of any transfer or of any access from a third country is asserted only for a configuration whose flows, administration access and subcontracting chain have been verified.

• Local inference — the agent runs on a machine you own (on your premises). The processing is designed to stay on your network. This is the maximum level of confidentiality, ideal for the most sensitive data.
• Hosting in France — we host the agent on our machines located in French data centres. You have no hardware to manage, and your data stays on national territory, under European law.

Sensitive data: the HDS hosting requirement, SecNumCloud and the sectors concerned

Some activities handle particularly protected data and require a higher level of security:

• Health — health deployment on quotation. The target architecture provides for hosting suited to health data, which French law requires to be entrusted to an HDS-certified host. Before any go-live, BLA checks the host chosen, the HDS certificate in force, the activities it covers, the subcontractors, the places of processing, remote access, retention and contractual responsibilities. Until those elements are in place, the offer is not directly orderable: write to us to study your health deployment.
• Public sector & strategic data — SecNumCloud qualification from ANSSI, the French national cybersecurity agency, the highest French standard for trusted cloud.
• Legal — lawyers' professional secrecy: a legal assistant cannot expose case documents to a third party.
• Finance & accounting — confidentiality of financial data, handled by an accounting agent or a financial analysis agent.

How we guarantee the sovereignty of your AI agent

Depending on the architecture chosen, the agent can be deployed on an isolated resource hosted in France, with encryption, role-based access and logging. The host, the subcontractors, the places of processing, any transfers and the measures actually included are set out in the quotation and in the evidence register.

• Hosting in France (or local inference on your own premises), with the deployment objective of processing and access operated within the European Union.
• Dependence on a provider subject to the Cloud Act is ruled out by design; the host chosen, its subcontractors and the laws applicable to them are named in the quotation.
• A data processing agreement carrying the obligations of Article 28 of the GDPR, encrypted access, logging and least privilege.
• HDS / SecNumCloud options for regulated data.
• Reversibility: your data and your configuration remain yours, retrievable at any time.

Sovereign AI vs American AI service

• Location of the data: France / European Union — vs — United States or multiple regions
• Applicable legal framework: GDPR, European law — vs — Subject to the Cloud Act
• Possible access by a foreign authority: reduced by design, checked configuration by configuration — vs — Possible
• Health / sensitive data: HDS / SecNumCloud available — vs — Rarely suitable
• Reversibility and control: contractual — vs — Depends on the provider