A vendor’s deck said "fully sovereign, data never leaves the country." The architecture diagram, three slides later, showed a telemetry pipeline and a model-hosting region both outside it. Not malice — just sovereignty bolted onto a global system, where the boundary is a setting rather than a shape.
The tell is always the same: ask where the control plane, the logs, and the model calls live. If any answer is "elsewhere, but encrypted," the sovereignty is on the slide, not in the system.
The takeaway
Sovereignty you can verify lives in the architecture. Sovereignty you have to trust lives in a footnote.