This workshop on Sovereign AI brings together the scientific and industrial communities to explore the design, training, evaluation, and deployment of foundation models within locally governed and controlled ecosystems. It aims to foster discussions on how large-scale and specialized foundation models can be developed using national or regional data, operated on trusted and sovereign infrastructures, and aligned with local regulations, languages, cultural contexts, and strategic priorities.

The workshop will convene researchers, engineers, policymakers, and R&D leaders from academia, startups, and industry to exchange insights on building sovereign foundation models that can support critical and strategic sectors such as defense and security, cultural heritage and digital patrimony preservation, agriculture, environment, healthcare, finance, education, and public services. A particular emphasis will be placed on technological sovereignty, data governance, energy efficiency, security, and ethical alignment as key enablers of sustainable, resilient, and trustworthy AI systems. Special attention will be given to the protection of sensitive data, national assets, and cultural identity through sovereign AI technologies.

We invite submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Architectures for large-scale and domain-specific foundation models

• Efficient training and inference techniques (distributed and federated training, optimization, model compression, retrieval-augmented generation)

• Data governance and data engineering for sovereign AI (data spaces, data curation, synthetic data, privacy-preserving and secure learning)

• Infrastructure for sovereign AI (secure, energy-efficient, and scalable compute, edge and cloud platforms, green AI)

• Evaluation, benchmarking, and alignment of foundation models for local languages, cultures, and regulatory frameworks

• Trust, transparency, explainability, and robustness in sovereign foundation models

• Deployment strategies and real-world applications in strategic and public-interest domains, including defense, national security, and cultural heritage preservation
  
  

The workshop welcomes:

• Original research papers

• System and industrial case studies

• Position or vision papers addressing challenges, opportunities, and future directions for sovereign foundation models
  
  

All submissions must be original and unpublished. They will undergo a rigorous peer-review process by experts from academia and industry. Accepted contributions will be presented at the workshop and may be considered for inclusion in post-event proceedings, a white paper, or a technical and strategic roadmap on Sovereign AI and Foundation Models.

This workshop aims to serve as a catalyst for building a shared vision and concrete technological pathways toward AI systems that are not only powerful and scalable, but also sovereign, secure, culturally grounded, and aligned with national and regional values and strategic interests.