P16: Promoting public policy to create digital commons for sovereign AI

Every data scientist today knows scikit-learn. And scikit-learn didn’t become a standard by accident. Its success is the result of years of thoughtful engineering, strong community involvement, and sustained public investment. The French government drew inspiration from its success to launch P16, a program to support open source sovereign AI libraries. We will revisit the various actions taken to select promising libraries, ensure that they become standards adopted by as many people as possible, emphasizing the importance of maintenance and communities, and the need to find sustainable funding methods. Because shaping the future of AI in France and Europe also means owning the foundations it’s built upon.