Donald Tusk's government proposed a mandatory technological sovereignty test on Tuesday 21 July for Polish public technology contracts above 5 million zloty, about $1.3m, and infrastructure projects above 15 million zloty.1 Poland's Ministry of Digital Affairs would score bids against three criteria: state control over system architecture, ownership or access rights to artificial intelligence (AI) model weights, and freedom from vendor lock-in. The stated aim is domestic alternatives taking 20 to 30 per cent of the market.
This is a proposal, not a statute. It has not passed the Sejm, no commencement date has been set, and the criteria could be softened or dropped before any tender is scored against them. Poland's suppliers, most of them American, have several months in which to lobby.
Poland's model-weights criterion has no equivalent in the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), the EU cloud law adopted by the College of Commissioners in June after three slipped dates . CADA grades a contract by how far the buyer depends on the operator running the cloud, and says nothing whatever about who owns the weights of the model running on top of it. Weights are the trained parameters of a model, the numbers that determine how it behaves, so whoever holds them decides whether the system can be run, audited or retrained without the vendor's permission.
At 5 million zloty, a sovereignty score attaches to routine ministry procurement rather than to flagship national systems alone, which means a mid-sized case-management contract in Warsaw would be assessed on model-weight rights while the identical contract in Brussels would not. Warsaw drafted that clause in a fortnight for its own tenders. Whether it survives contact with the legislative process, and whether other member states copy the wording, decides if it becomes a European standard by imitation rather than by directive.
