Sovereign AI Toolkit

A practical guide for creative and cultural organisations

Sovereign: AI you run on your own systems, in line with your obligations on data, copyright, and accountability.

Open model: an AI model that is open source. You can download it and run it on your own computer. Closed products like ChatGPT and Claude cannot.

This toolkit recommends open models, run on your own systems.

Where to start

AI Readiness Area	What sovereign looks like	Where to start
Leadership & governance	Leadership can name risks, evaluate them, and hold a position	Leadership position
GDPR, data protection & confidentiality	Sensitive material processed locally	Block A
Approved tools & access	A sanctioned set of AI tools staff can actually use	Block B
Staff use, skills & confidence	A safe place for staff to use AI	Block A and Block B
Workflow & productivity opportunities	AI embedded in real work	Block B
Knowledge, archive & reusable assets	AI that works with your own documents	Block C
Creative rights, IP & accountability	Creative material handled locally, with audit trails	Block A

Block A

Block B

Block C

What: Block B plus the ability to read your own documents.
Covers: Knowledge, archive, reusable assets. Deeper workflow.
Best for: Organisations turning institutional memory into a working resource.
Tools: AnythingLLM·Open WebUI
Note: Most organisations benefit from a partner at this stage.

Run any of these in the blocks above. Each links to its permanent home.

Maker: Meta
License: Llama Community License
Strengths: Strongest general-purpose open model, and the most widely supported across the tools above. Works at any scale, from a single laptop to a shared server.
Limits: License allows commercial use but is more restrictive than Apache 2.0. Use is subject to Meta's acceptable use policy.

Maker: Mistral AI (France)
License: Apache 2.0
Strengths: EU-based. Reliable general-purpose all-rounder with good European-language support. Apache 2.0 license means no usage restrictions.
Limits: Not every Mistral model is self-hostable — some are released only as a paid API, outside the scope of this toolkit.

Maker: Google
License: Gemma Terms of Use
Strengths: Best-in-class on laptop and desktop hardware. Strong multilingual support.
Limits: Less suited for the largest deployment scales than Llama or Mistral. License is open weights with a use policy, similar in spirit to Llama's.

The next step. Identify which areas are most pressing for your organisation.