The Bunker Manifesto
Being able to read, repair, move and run your own computing is what keeps you in control of your own tools. Yesterday it was the cloud. Today it's AI.
When intelligence becomes something you can only rent from a handful of closed institutions, you lose more than software freedom: you lose the freedom to work, learn, research and build without asking permission.
AI is becoming base infrastructure, like electricity or the network: for work, education, science, public services. Access to it can't depend on a closed API, terms that change overnight, opaque moderation or a price set by a few companies.
We've carried this conviction for years, for computing in general. AI is just the latest front.
Everything has to stay possible without asking permission: studying, building, repairing, deploying, auditing, adapting, teaching, preserving and running your own systems. That's what separates a tool you own from a service you put up with.
What you can't inspect or reproduce, you can't control. We tell genuine open-source software apart from open-weight models: downloading weights is not the same as being able to rebuild everything. We name the difference instead of blurring it.
Infrastructure has to outlive its vendor. If the provider changes course, raises prices or disappears, your systems keep running on your own hardware, in your own country. Everything stays locally deployable and reproducible, with no key held by someone else.
The only capacity we care about is our own, Europe's. Your data is hosted in Europe under the GDPR, the infrastructure is ready for your AI Act obligations, and the standards stay open and shared. Being sovereign means keeping your hand on what runs the continent.
We refuse to let thinking become a subscription. When a few closed labs control the models, the infrastructure of cognition turns into a tollgate. Price, terms and availability must never depend on a single gateway.
This fight applies to everything: compute, storage, identity, monitoring, backup. AI makes it visible, but the lock-in is the same everywhere. Open computing is a condition for sovereignty.
We're not alone in thinking this. The Open Source Initiative's Open Source AI Definition, the call from many European organisations (Mistral, Hugging Face, Mozilla, Red Hat) for open AI in service of the continent's sovereignty, and the EuroStack initiative, which we've signed, draw the same line. Across the Atlantic, voices like the Open Source AI Must Win manifesto defend openness. We defend it from Europe, for Europe.
A manifesto without a product is just a pose. In practice, it takes the shape of a sovereign cloud hosted in Europe, the ability to bring your infrastructure back from the hyperscalers, and open-weight LLMs you deploy on your own hardware (Mistral, Qwen, Llama), with a private API, without sending anything to a US API.
Let's build the alternative together.