§ The manifesto · 2026
The drum
of liberation.
Intelligence you can’t be locked out of.
Written the day intelligence got a kill switch.Nika is named for the sun god of liberation: the drum that turns fear into laughter and frees the ones who were locked out.
Every workflow run is a beat of that drum.
On a Friday afternoon, by a single letter, the most capable intelligence on Earth was switched off for most of the people on Earth. Not deleted. Not broken. Revoked. One government decided who was allowed to think with it, and overnight, the rest of us were locked out of a tool we had been building our lives on.
This is the moment the argument ended.
The real problem was never which lab is ahead. It is who controls access to intelligence:
Your entire cognitive stack. If all of it lives behind closed providers, it is not yours. It is rented. And what is rented can be priced out, locked down, or turned off, by a board, a court, a border, a letter.
We refuse the subscription economy for cognition.
And as these tools start to act on the world, the same rule holds for what they do, not just where they run. An agent should never act from a hidden prompt. The plan it intends to run should be a file you can read, and reviewable before it acts. Power you cannot see is power you do not control.
There is no US open source AI. There is no French open source AI. Open source is open knowledge, shared infrastructure, and the right to run, study, modify, and own intelligence. Don’t fight the cage by repainting it. Leave it.
Sovereignty for everyone, or for no one.
§ What we promise
Built for the day the tap closes.
01
Cognitive liberty
Bring any model. Local, open-weight, or frontier. Swappable at will. No lab is the load-bearing wall, so if one disappears tomorrow, your work does not.
17 providers · 5 local ↗02
Sovereign memory
Your context, your taste, your habits live on your hardware. Readable, exportable, deletable, without asking anyone. Never hosted, never for rent.
permits: default-deny ↗03
Work that survives
Useful work becomes source. Plain text, versioned, replayable. Still yours in ten years, on a machine that never phones home.
plain YAML · replayable trace ↗04
Craft over capture
Quality over volume. Less, but better. The license makes the freedom structural, not a favour we could quietly take back.
AGPL-3.0-or-later ↗05
A galaxy, not a monolith
No single point that anyone can switch off. Composable, plural, sovereign by design.
one binary · no daemon ↗§ The record
The manifesto states. The record proves.
Two lines run through the last three decades. One builds the cage: the letters and laws deciding who may think with what. One beats the drum: ramparts held, weights set free, coalitions forming. Every entry is dated, sourced, and yours to verify.
control advances stay grey. liberation carries the light.
Just a hobby
A student posts a free operating system to a Usenet group: nothing big or professional, he says. The commons that carries the sovereign stack begins here.
The Clipper Chip
The NSA ships a phone chip with a spare key for the state, escrowed for law enforcement under warrant. Abandoned by 1996. The first crypto war.
The Web, set free
CERN puts the World Wide Web software in the public domain. The same year the Clipper Chip ships, the counter-move ships too.
Retain everything
The EU orders whole-population metadata retention. The blueprint every scanning law since has traced.
Collect it all
A secret court order for every phone record, then PRISM. Bulk collection stops being a rumor and becomes a document.
A rampart holds
The EU Court of Justice strikes down blanket data retention as disproportionate. Mass retention is not a default.
The Snooper’s Charter
The Investigatory Powers Act puts bulk interception and equipment interference on the statute book.
Australia vs mathematics
Parliament votes to compel decryption assistance. A law against mathematics; the mathematics does not move.
Chat Control 1.0
Voluntary scanning of private messages enters EU law as a temporary measure. The word temporary turns out to be load-bearing.
Chat Control 2.0
The Commission proposes mandatory scanning of encrypted messages. The impossible, requested in writing.
Weights go public
A European lab releases a frontier-class model as open weights, by magnet link. The era of downloadable intelligence begins in earnest.
The spy clause
The Online Safety Act keeps a message-scanning power where technically feasible. The key stays in the door.
Trained across continents
The first 10-billion-parameter model trained collaboratively across the globe, over ordinary internet links. Federated frontier training stops being a thesis.
Papers, please
Show ID to use the internet: UK age checks go live. VPN signups jump 1,400% within days.
WhatsApp goes dark
Throttle, then strangle, then cut: a messenger goes dark for 100 million people for refusing to break encryption.
Parliament says no
The European Parliament declines to extend voluntary message scanning, 311 votes against. The cage loses one, in public.
Tapestry launches
A coalition of 200+ organizations starts co-training a frontier base model: every node keeps its data home and owns its derivative.
Anti-capture, named
Thirty leaders from five continents meet in Paris and name the design law: sovereignty enforced by architecture, not policy.
The kill switch
On a Friday, by a single letter, the US Commerce Department orders the most capable models on Earth switched off beyond its borders. The manifesto above was written that day.
A billion-person node
In G7 week, India commits: BharatGen anchors the national role in Tapestry and co-leads distributed training.
The tap reopens
Nineteen days later the models return, as suddenly as they went. The tap reopens. The switch stays.
The UN names it
At the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the Secretary-General warns: the most advanced systems are concentrated in a handful of companies and countries.
The majority flips
The blocking minority collapses, 314 to 361: message scanning is greenlit to 2028.
The answer, in public
"The only solution to AI sovereignty is open source foundation models." The reply lands three days after the UN names the concentration of power.
the record continues · updated
every entry carries a primary source · nothing from memory
Open source AI must win.
Not for a nation. For everyone.
The drum of liberation is getting louder.