What Breaks When You Build AI Under Sovereignty Constraints - Bilge Yücel, deepset GmbH

If you send EU citizen data to an embedding API hosted in Virginia, you have already violated GDPR. That is one hidden assumption. Most production AI systems have dozens more, baked into the architecture long before anyone asked whether the system was sovereign. Bilge Yücel walks through the four sovereignty pillars (data, model, infrastructure, operations) and what actually breaks when you retrofit each one: re-evaluating performance from scratch after swapping a frontier API for a self-hosted model, managing multiple databases across jurisdictions after moving private data, and discovering how much vendor lock-in you had the moment you try to go on-prem. The closing checklist is three questions: can you swap models without changing application logic, do you have reproducible run logs stored in a compliant location, and can your team respond to an incident without calling a hyperscaler. Speaker info: - https://x.com/bilgeycl - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bilge-yucel/