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Pillar 02 of five
What you ship
What runs underneath
VAO · pillar 02 · what runs underneath
Nine layers an orchestration vendor has to choose deliberately.
Each tool carries a maturity word — how far this choice has been taken, not how well-sourced a claim is. It is a separate scale from the [E] / [P] / [I] evidence tags used elsewhere on the site.
What decides
Holds the graph of steps, the state between them, and the pause-and-resume path when a human has to approve something.
One path to every model, so no agent names a provider. Routing by task class and cost, and one model family checking another's work before anything binding.
Three classes, from frontier reasoning down to small and fast, plus the open-weight class that makes sovereign deployment possible.
Where taught judgement is compiled into a model rather than held in prompts.
What it knows
Finding the right prior case in years of correspondence, in several languages, where half the meaning sits in part numbers and reference codes.
Not just the protocol. Who may reach which system, whether this specific call is allowed right now, whether it was logged, and what re-qualifies a tool when its description changes.
The domain graph, the checkpointed run state, the retrieval indexes, and the versioned artefacts.
What proves it
Traces of what each agent saw, chose and cost. Then three classes of test — taught-routine suites, whole-loop runs in a synthetic environment, and calibration.
A third party given the trajectories, the methodology and access to the team — which then verifies the score and reviews the hardest cases.
Ask where the data physically runs. Then ask, separately, who could be legally compelled to hand it over. Two questions, two different answers — and conflating them is the most common error in a sovereignty pitch.
| Player | Deployment sovereignty | Legal sovereignty | What it is the right answer to |
|---|---|---|---|
| MistralFR · Apache 2.0 | clears | clears | The default for a French or EU-jurisdiction mandate. On-premise, air-gapped or EU trusted-cloud, and the only one of the four with live defence-sector deployment. |
| Cohere / Aleph AlphaCA · DE | clears | clears | Regulated-sector accounts wanting a production track record rather than a model release. Check which licence variant a proposal names — the earlier one is non-commercial, and the terms are not interchangeable. |
| NVIDIA NemotronUS · open weights | clears | does not | Long-horizon agentic work — the class this architecture actually stresses. Best-documented training data of the four, which strengthens a never-trained-on-your-data commitment when a compliance team asks what the base model itself saw. |
| IBM GraniteUS · Apache 2.0 | clears | does not | Audit-trail and indemnification-first accounts where vendor nationality is not the binding constraint. IP indemnification is a standard term, which none of the other three offer by default. |
Sovereignty is only real if the deployment topology supports it. Four of them — and the last is the one to design for first even though it sells last, because everything that makes it possible relaxes into the other three. The reverse is a rewrite.