---
title: "Framework: the five properties of a sovereign AI stack"
slug: "five-properties"
kind: "framework"
order: 22
label: "Framework"
summary: "A checklist a CIO can verify, not a slogan. Each chapter of this book maps back to one of these five properties; Appendix A turns them into a maturity model and Appendix B into a scored assessment."
words: 241
---

A checklist a CIO can verify, not a slogan. Each chapter of this book maps back to one of these five properties; Appendix A turns them into a maturity model and Appendix B into a scored assessment.

1. **You own the code.** The complete source of the platform, backend and infrastructure included, under a perpetual license. You can read it, audit it, modify it, and run it after the vendor is gone.

2. **You own the data, in place.** Agents reach systems of record where they live, through connectors and a broker you control. Nothing is copied into a vendor's index, and nothing leaves your perimeter that you did not route out deliberately.

3. **You choose the model, and can change it.** Every model is a setting, not a dependency. Commercial APIs, open-weight models on your own GPUs, or both, routed by cost, latency, capability and data classification, switchable without touching an integration.

4. **Your clients share one identity.** Web, browser extension, desktop, mobile and terminal are one backend and one sign-in. User-scoped tokens live with the user; the organization's credential lives only on the server. New applications are built without anyone handling a secret.

5. **Your agents run inside a harness you can inspect.** The loop that reads, decides and acts is yours to read, with memory scopes, approval modes, step and token budgets, a sandbox with a network boundary, a stop button, and an audit line for every action.