Germany spent public millions on a "Sovereign Open Source" AI, then gated it and let a vendor sell it. Real openness is a mandate, not a label.
Open source is a promise, not a logo. A German public AI project took the money, wears the open-source label, and then locks people out of the very thing they had already paid for.
SOOFI stands for Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models. It is a German government-funded model, roughly €20 million of public money, built to give Europe its own AI instead of renting one from California. Good goal. I want it to work.
So I went looking for it. Every model like this has a public page with the weights and the licence. SOOFI's page says, in its own words, that this is "a beta preview and a research artifact," and "not an open release." On its own, that would be fine. New models stage their release all the time.
Here is the catch. The model is not open to the public yet, but T-Systems, the project's infrastructure partner, is already using it to sell their paid cloud. Public money trained it. A private company is turning it into a sales pitch before the people who funded it can even log in.
Here is the part that matters, because this is not about one project.
"Publicly funded" tells you nothing about whether you ever get the model. The mandate does. Switzerland funded Apertus and published the lot: the weights (the actual trained model, where the cost and the value sit), the training data, and the full recipe, under a licence that allows commercial use. You can run it, and you can see how it was built. You can talk to it today in your browser, no account needed. Germany funded Teuken and shipped it open too, a permissive licence, weights there for anyone. Two public models, both fully open, both yours to use right now.
The Netherlands did the honest version of not-open. It funded its own model, GPT-NL, then chose not to release the weights freely, so you cannot download it. But it never dressed that up as open source. It had a real reason: instead of scraping the web for free, it licensed its training text from Dutch news publishers and pays them a cut of the revenue. Openness lost to paying the people whose work trained it. A trade-off you can argue with, but an honest one.
SOOFI is not that. Same country, same public money, opposite result. You can download Teuken today. Getting SOOFI means qualifying as a partner and waiting for approval, while its name still says "Open Source" and it doubles as a sales pitch for a private cloud. That is the move to watch for.
So the next time a "sovereign, open" public model gets announced, do not trust the press release. Read the terms. Does the licence match the name, or does "open" live only on the marketing? Will everyone get in eventually, or is it fenced off for chosen partners? And is a company charging for access to a model the public already paid for? A permanent partners-only gate, with a vendor selling entry, is the opposite of open.
You paid for these models. So who gets to decide whether you are allowed to use them?
