Glossary
The 29 terms the framework documents use, each defined once. This is the package's own glossary, printed here as it appears in the appendix of Document 1; each term links to itself, so its address can be copied.
- AI-SAF / AI-SAF-C / AI-SAF-N
- The AI Strategic Autonomy Framework and its business and national variants; eight shared pillars at different weights; AI-SAF-C adds a ninth (Culture).
- Base model
- A large language model trained from scratch on trillions of tokens (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Gemma, Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen).
- Branch-and-Merge
- INSAIT’s training method (EMNLP 2024) for adapting a model to a new language without catastrophic forgetting.
- CADA / Cloud Sovereignty Framework
- The EU Cloud and AI Development Act (proposed 3 June 2026); its Cloud Sovereignty Framework grades cloud services on four assurance levels, from EU data location (L1) to full supply-chain control free of third-country interference (L4).
- Capability × commitment
- Splitting every sub-score into what is actually in place today versus what has been promised.
- Chokepoint exposure
- Vulnerability at the make-or-break steps of the chip supply chain (EUV lithography, leading-edge logic, HBM, EDA software, key chemicals).
- CLOUD Act
- The US Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (2018), authorising federal access to data held abroad by US companies.
- CUDA
- NVIDIA’s software layer for its chips; the de facto standard for AI training and the main switching barrier away from NVIDIA.
- Data Act Chapter VII
- The EU Data Act provisions (fully applicable September 2025) aimed at third-country access.
- Data egress
- The flow of a subject’s own data out to a third-party model at inference time — prompts, retrieved context, tool calls, fine-tuning sets, logs.
- Digital Omnibus on AI
- The EU amending package (in force 27 July 2026) deferring the AI Act’s high-risk obligations to December 2027 / August 2028 while leaving GPAI enforcement on schedule.
- DORA
- The EU Digital Operational Resilience Act for the financial sector, applicable from January 2025.
- FRIA
- Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment, AI Act Article 27.
- GAIA-X
- European certification of cloud and data services against sovereignty criteria at three levels; L3 requires SecNumCloud-grade immunity from foreign-reach laws.
- ISA
- Instruction Set Architecture — the command set a processor understands (x86, ARM, RISC-V).
- ISO/IEC 42001
- The certifiable international AI-management standard (December 2023); nine Annex A control groups; a stepping stone to AI Act Articles 53/55.
- MoE
- Mixture of Experts — a model design activating different specialist sub-models per input.
- MRM / SR 11-7
- Model Risk Management; the US supervisory standard widely adopted in EU banking — challenger models, monitoring, model inventory, documentation.
- NIST AI RMF
- The US AI risk-management framework (Govern, Map, Measure, Manage); backbone of the AI-SAF-C crosswalk.
- No-train clause
- A contract clause barring a model provider from using your inputs or outputs to train its models.
- Open-weights
- A model whose trained weights can be freely downloaded and run (Llama, Mistral, Gemma, Qwen, DeepSeek); not always fully open-source.
- Restoration risk
- The error of reading a supplier-side reversal (a lifted directive, an extended support window) as evidence of the subject’s own recoverability. See Framework §3.5.
- RISC-V
- An open, royalty-free ISA; the strategic alternative to x86 and ARM (Tenstorrent, EU DARE, Meta MTIA).
- SecNumCloud
- France’s ANSSI certification (v3.2) — the established scheme requiring a cloud service to be beyond the reach of foreign laws such as the CLOUD Act and FISA.
- Strategic interdependence
- Deliberately depending on several partners so no single one can dictate — the realistic alternative to autarky for small and mid-sized economies.
- Synthetic collapse
- The effect shown by Shumailov et al. (Nature, 2024): repeatedly training on AI-generated data permanently strips away rare cases.
- TEE
- Trusted Execution Environment — hardware-isolated execution (Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP, NVIDIA Confidential Computing) enabling private inference on clouds you do not control.
- Version Deadlock
- The state in which a subject loses the capacity to evolve technologically because access to the next version of a key technology has been interrupted.
- vLLM / SGLang / llama.cpp
- Open-source inference engines; alternatives to NVIDIA’s TensorRT-LLM that run models without CUDA dependence.