Deutsche Telekom pitches 'AI sovereignty' to corporate clients

Data sovereignty – the idea that certain information stored and processed in the cloud should not cross international boundaries – has been widely understood for years, and now DT is extending the practice to AI, hoping to attract those wary of trusting their data to the likes of OpenAI, Google Gemini, and so-on.

"If not now, when does Europe need more sovereign solutions? Only through joint European efforts we can create competitive alternatives to major international providers. Teuken-7B from OpenGPT-X is a flagship project 'Made in Germany' and a crucial component in the digital strategies of customers who prioritise sovereignty," said Dr. Ferri Abolhassan, CEO of T-Systems and DT board member.

The LLM underpinning DT's new offering was developed by OpenGPT-X, an open source generative AI (Gen-AI) project backed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). It made Teuken-7B freely available late last month.

It has 7 billion parameters, can converse in all 24 official European Union languages, and is available to use under the Apache 2.0 open source licence.

"Providing Teuken as an open-source model has multiple advantages. Companies can tailor the model to their needs, developing specialised applications. They can also choose to run the model locally on their infrastructure or with a trusted cloud provider of their choice. This allows sensitive data to remain within the organisation," said Dr. Nicolas Flores-Herr, project lead at German AI and big data specialist Fraunhofer IAIS, which coordinated the joint development of Teuken.

DT's IT services subsidiary T-Systems will give customers the opportunity to run Teuken-powered applications powered by in what it calls ultra-secure, certified data centres in Germany, providing full compliance with European GDPR regulations. It will also serve customers that want to run Teuken apps on their own infrastructure.

DT is targeting regulated industries that process highly sensitive data, that must adhere to the most stringent security and compliance requirements.

Teuken is also integrated into DT's Business GPT offering, which gives customers a choice of LLMs with which to work. It has been designed to summarise documents and power chatbots and the like. Available through a unified API, businesses can integrate them into AI assistants, agents and their own proprietary apps.

Meanwhile, there is still nothing to report on one of DT's other AI ventures, the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA).

It is nearly six months since DT, along with e&, Singtel, SK Telecom (SKT), and SoftBank agreed to establish a joint venture that would co-develop and sell multilingual, telco-focused large language models.

So far the group has nothing to show for it, and with DT now offering access to an open source German-speaking LLM, and SKT developing its own GenAI platform, there is a growing sense that the GTAA has missed the boat.