AI agents are transforming software development, science, industry and public administration. Their capabilities are growing rapidly: roughly every six months, the time it takes them to independently perform complex tasks at a human level is halved. They plan, learn from their mistakes and continuously improve.

Whoever masters this technology and its supply chains can accelerate innovation and produce at significantly lower cost. Today, our industry uses black-box models from the US and open-weight models from China. Neither supply chain is entirely reliable anymore.

Europe must not remain dependent in this area. We must develop and control the key building blocks ourselves:

1. Our own powerful core models

Europe needs robust core models with deep domain knowledge and the ability to plan for the long term. These form the basis for specialised agents and industrial value creation. Without our own core models, we remain technologically dependent and cannot control the value chain.

2. Adaptive local agent memory

Agents must continuously learn whilst in operation. This requires an efficient, potentially neural, memory for relevant experiential knowledge – one that is more elegant and powerful than today’s token-based storage systems.

3. Specialised local complementary models

Smaller, specialised models are required for typically European domains, such as plant control, mechanical engineering, automotive, materials science, chemistry, biology, healthcare or law. Companies must be able to adapt base models behind the firewall using their own data, thereby building complementary specialised models with low-cost structures.

4. Secure local running environments

Agents must be able to operate in controllable, local environments. Unfortunately, the closed ecosystems of many US companies force data outflow, non-transparent updates and unclear cost structures. Europe therefore needs open, independently controllable running environments that integrate base models, agent-based memory and specialised models.

Europe must take control of this supply chain for these four modules itself. It is just as crucial for the security and freedom of future generations as it is for military capability or energy policy sovereignty. SOOFI is the flagship project of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE), which is systematically building precisely this technological sovereignty and the ecosystem required for it.

March 2026