A new vendor-neutral initiative aims to help organizations avoid getting trapped by a single AI provider, where switching can force teams to rebuild workloads, move data, and untangle integrations. The Eclipse Foundation announced the Sovereign AI Foundation on Wednesday, a body designed to help member organizations manage AI platform lock-in, monitor cyber risk, and maintain control of their data. The group launched with 17 participating organizations from across technology, industry, research, and the open-source community, and has been active on Eclipse's project site since July.
The foundation's initial community spans nine countries, with members including 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; North Carolina's Red Hat; and the University of York in the UK. The organization will focus on five areas: mapping real-world use cases, assessing technologies and trends, developing practical resources like whitepapers and blueprints, building a peer community, and translating research from Eclipse Foundation initiatives into actionable insights. The group invites eligible Eclipse Foundation member organizations to participate, with additional organizations already in the process of joining.
Executive director at the Eclipse Foundation, Mike Milinkovich, told The New Stack that the severity of risk from failing to adopt an open approach depends on how deeply AI is embedded in an organization and how hard the underlying systems are to modify. "The deeper the dependency, the greater the potential risk," Milinkovich said. According to Milinkovich, the foundation's work will include comparing real-world experiences and building stronger evidence around those risks, with costs appearing "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 insisted that AI won't deliver on its potential if it relies entirely on dependence on a relatively small number of providers for critical AI models, platforms, and infrastructure.
The foundation's director explained that the need is clearest wherever AI is used in systems with long lifecycles, demanding safety and security requirements, or sensitive data, including automotive, manufacturing, telecommunications, aerospace and defense, energy, and the public sector. Milinkovich described the challenge as three-fold: it's an efficiency issue if moving to a better or less expensive model requires rebuilding the workload, a security issue if organizations lack the visibility needed to assess risk, and a lock-in and resilience issue if critical operations become so tied to one provider that changing direction is costly or disruptive. Early use cases are already taking shape, with EclipseSource working with industrial customers on AI-enabled development tools where teams need flexibility over models and deployment, and Eurotech using Eclipse-governed projects to bring AI to the edge in environments that must remain secure, reliable, and maintainable for years.
The foundation expects interest to extend well beyond Europe in the coming weeks and months, as dependence on critical AI technologies is a global concern. Milinkovich confirmed the common approach across member projects is modularity, keeping models, infrastructure, and applications separate enough that one can change without rebuilding everything, with the foundation's job being to capture what works and turn it into guidance others can use. Organizations that embed AI deeply into operations now face a choice between accepting potential future switching costs or building with flexibility from the start. The vendor-neutral structure offers a forum where companies can share experiences and develop practical strategies without favoring any single provider's ecosystem.