Glossary

The sovereign AI glossary

Cloud Act, RAG, air-gapped, shadow AI… The key terms of enterprise AI, explained simply and without needless jargon.

AI Act (EU AI regulation)

The world's first comprehensive AI regulatory framework, adopted by the European Union in 2024, applied progressively by risk level.

An AI system able to chain multiple actions autonomously to achieve a goal: research, analyze, draft, use tools.

A computing environment physically or logically isolated from the internet, used for the most sensitive data and systems.

A 2018 US law allowing American authorities to compel access to data held by US companies, wherever it is hosted in the world.

Partially retraining an AI model on specific data to specialize it for a domain, tone or task.

How the General Data Protection Regulation applies to processing performed by artificial intelligence systems.

A design principle where a human validates the critical decisions or actions of an AI system before execution.

An AI model trained on huge text corpora, able to understand and generate natural language — the building block of AI assistants.

A deployment model where software and data run on the company's own servers, in its offices or datacenter, rather than in a vendor's cloud.

An AI model whose weights are published and downloadable, allowing it to run on your own infrastructure without depending on its creator's cloud.

A technique connecting an AI model to company documents: the AI retrieves relevant passages before answering, with cited sources.

The French ANSSI qualification guaranteeing that a cloud service offers the highest security level and protection against extraterritorial laws.

Hosting an application yourself — including an AI platform — on infrastructure you control, rather than consuming a SaaS.

Employees using AI tools without company approval or oversight, exposing sensitive data to third-party services.

Artificial intelligence where the company controls the infrastructure, data and models, with no legal dependency on a foreign operator.