Canada–Germany: a sovereign technology alliance — what evidence should businesses ask for?
Canada and Germany are preparing cooperation on sovereign AI. For Belgian and French businesses, our recommendation is to translate that ambition into verifiable technical criteria before choosing a platform.
1. An alliance still in preparation
In a statement published on September 17, 2026, the Canadian government reports on the first meeting of the Sovereign Technology Alliance co-chairs, held alongside ALL IN in Montreal. The aim is to strengthen sovereign AI capabilities with trusted partners. A launch with founding members is envisaged in the coming months. The statement specifies no commercial offering, budget or service commitments.
2. What this changes for Belgian and French businesses
Underside analysis: this announcement warrants monitoring potential suppliers and partnerships, but is insufficient grounds for selecting a solution. We advise IT leaders to retain their current purchasing criteria and request evidence for each individual service. Cooperation between governments does not, by itself, describe access to the system that will process company documents.
For an SME, the first step could be an inventory of the data entrusted to each assistant. A mid-sized company could add a dependency map covering the model, host, document retrieval engine and support provider. A public administration or large enterprise could request a continuity scenario and a demonstration of how to leave the service before making a commitment.
3. Underside analysis: distinguish partnerships from operational control
Our assessment separates three dimensions: where processing takes place, who can intervene and the ability to switch suppliers. For an internal RAG system, examine documents as well as indexes, backups and logs. For an agent connected to Odoo, identify who authorizes reads and writes and how those permissions can be revoked.
A useful test is to ask the supplier to trace a request from end to end: components called, regions used, service accounts and any support access. This check should cover the configuration offered to the customer. It helps distinguish a sovereignty ambition from a verifiable commitment for a particular service.
4. Prepare a decision without anticipating future announcements
We recommend creating a record for each candidate solution: contractual locations for processing and backups, key management, administrator permissions, external dependencies, data export and deletion procedures. Each item should have supporting evidence, an owner and a verification date.
To test portability, use a small, non-sensitive corpus and measure the effort required to transfer the documents, rebuild the index and rerun an evaluation on another platform. This approach supports comparisons of actual options as new offerings emerge, without presuming the outcome of the alliance.
Suggested action: document your control and exit requirements, then assess each future offering against them. Partnership membership provides context; it is not technical evidence.
Assess your AI architecture