In this series, we’ve been arguing that sovereignty is the only sustainable path for professional judgment in an agentic world. We started by looking at the infrastructure we’ll need for sovereign intelligence, then at the difference between sovereign systems and AI wrappers, and most recently at dark patterns that steer people into feeding someone else’s models.

In our series on digital sovereignty, we have explored how "Harvesting Models" use dark patterns to bypass consent and how "AI Wrappers" quietly extract value from your institutional judgment data. But there is one final, definitive test of a vendor’s intent: What happens when you want to leave?

In earlier posts we argued that sovereignty is the only sustainable path for professional judgment, and that organisations need infrastructure which lets them own and operate their own intelligence. There’s another layer to this: even if the architecture is centralised, the interface can quietly decide who wins. The way AI is presented in a product can make the difference between a conscious choice and a gentle shove.