Soofi S is the first foundation model developed by the Munich-based open-source project “Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models”. It is intended to provide a technical basis for industrial AI applications, allowing companies, public authorities, research organisations and start-ups to build their own solutions on top of it. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and involves, among others, Fraunhofer institutes, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, universities and start-ups.
The model is based on an open architecture developed by chipmaker Nvidia. Rather than fundamentally changing the architecture or carrying out additional post-training, the researchers focused on data selection and the training process itself. The training data consisted mainly of German- and English-language text. In English-language benchmarks, Soofi S ranks among the leading freely available models of a similar size.
Soofi S is not intended to serve as a general-purpose chatbot or to compete with particularly large language models. Instead, its aim is to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty. Organisations should be able to adapt the model transparently to their own requirements and run it on their own infrastructure. This makes it a traceable alternative to non-European AI models, particularly for specialised industrial applications.
By Ida Kandler
Source: BR, 21 July 2026, by Ariane Stürmer and Marie Kilg