AI a 'black box'? Europe's new AI model, Soofi, weaponizes transparency

Imagine you’ve just had a truly delicious meal, but you have absolutely no way of knowing the recipe. It’s like a ‘black box’ dish where you have no idea what the ingredients are, how long it was cooked, or what special techniques were used.

The artificial intelligence (AI) industry is currently in exactly this position. Cutting-edge AI models are released daily, but corporate secrets keep the data they were fed and how they were trained tightly under wraps. However, a model has now emerged from Europe that directly challenges this ‘culture of secrecy.’ It is ‘Soofi S,’ an open-source AI model unveiled by the ‘Soofi’ team at Deutsche Telekom in Germany.

Why does this matter?

You might think, “Shouldn’t we just use the AI with the best performance?” However, when integrating AI into corporate tasks or public services, ‘trustworthiness’ is essential. For example, if you are using an AI to summarize your company’s confidential documents, you can’t help but feel anxious if you don’t know how that AI functions internally.

Soofi S discloses everything, including model weights (the strength of connections within the AI’s brain), intermediate check-points, and even the data provenance (origin records of the data used for training) Source: [2607.09424] A Sovereign, Open-Source Foundation Model for German and English, Source: SoofiS: A SovereignFoundationModelfor German and English. By using transparency as a weapon, it is designed to ensure that users can fully trust and utilize the AI.

Easy to understand

Let’s use metaphors to make Soofi S’s technical features easier to understand.

First, ‘it even reveals the study methods of a genius student.’ Typically, AI models only share their output, but Soofi S has opened up its training code and hyperparameters (AI training environment settings) Source: [2607.09424] A Sovereign, Open-Source Foundation Model for German and English. It’s like a student who got the top score on an entrance exam sharing their detailed planner, showing exactly which workbooks they used and how many hours they spent studying.

Second, it uses a smart brain architecture called ‘Mixture-of-Experts (MoE).’ The Soofi S 30B-A3B model has a total of 30 billion parameters, but it only activates 3 billion of them when answering a question [Source: SoofiS 30B activates 3B parameters per token, tops…

UncensoredHub](https://uncensoredhub.ai/news/2026-07-13-soofi-s-30b-activates-3b-parameters-per-token-tops-european-ai-baselines). It’s similar to going to a department store and heading straight to the ‘shoe store’ instead of wandering through the entire building. This allows for much faster and more efficient response generation.

Third, it received ‘customized education for English and German.’ Rather than trying to learn many languages, the Soofi team focused on English and German Source: [2607.09424] A Sovereign, Open-Source Foundation Model for German and English. Specifically, for German, the training data proportion was intentionally set higher to maximize German language processing capabilities Source: SOOFI (Soofi S) · innFactory AI Consulting - AI Strategy & Consulting.

Where is it being used?

Soofi S was born after learning approximately 27 trillion tokens (the minimum language unit read by AI, similar to puzzle pieces) Source: Michael Fromm on X. It is currently provided via Hugging Face (an open platform for sharing AI models), allowing anyone to view the related models, training code, and scripts Source: soofi-project · GitHub.

However, since this model is fully transparent, users need to personally test the data and verify its safety for their specific purposes Source: Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Base · Hugging Face. This is because it is closer to a ‘foundation model’ that provides a transparent base rather than a finished consumer AI product. In other words, you have been given a ‘basic toolbox’ where a chef can select their own ingredients and refine the recipe.

What will happen in the future?

Developed by European researchers with infrastructure located within Europe Source: Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Instruct-Preview · Hugging Face, the Soofi project appears poised to lead the trend of ‘Sovereign AI’ (AI that holds its own sovereignty over data and technology). It is an expression of the will to create transparent AI with our own technology, without relying on specific countries or Big Tech companies Source: European researchers releaseSoofiS 30B-A3B, a hybrid Mamba MoE….

Moving forward, the Soofi project plans to continuously release detailed benchmark scores to prove the model’s performance Source: Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Rhine-Preview · Hugging Face. An era where we can prove whether the AI we use is truly smart and reliable at the source-code level has moved one step closer.

MindTickleBytes AI reporter’s opinion

As AI becomes too smart, people feel the fear of “What on earth is this thing thinking?” Soofi is solving that fear with a technical solution called ‘transparency.’ I look forward to seeing how much trust in our society an AI with a fully disclosed development process can gain.

References

1. [2607.09424] A Sovereign, Open-Source Foundation Model for German and English (https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09424)
2. Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Base · Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Base)
3. SOOFI (Soofi S) · innFactory AI Consulting - AI Strategy & Consulting (https://innfactory.ai/en/ai-models/soofi/)
4. soofi-project · GitHub (https://github.com/soofi-project)
5. Soofi-Project (Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models) (https://huggingface.co/Soofi-Project)
6. Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Rhine-Preview · Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Rhine-Preview)
7. Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Instruct-Preview · Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/Soofi-Project/Soofi-S-Instruct-Preview)
8. Soofi:Completetrainingcodeforanopen-sourcefoundationmodel (https://modernorange.io/item/48918292)

9. SoofiS 30B activates 3B parameters per token, tops…

   UncensoredHub (https://uncensoredhub.ai/news/2026-07-13-soofi-s-30b-activates-3b-parameters-per-token-tops-european-ai-baselines)

10. SoofiS: A SovereignFoundationModelfor German and English (https://www.emergentmind.com/videos/sovereign-open-source-bilingual-llm-cef87c5b)
11. European researchers releaseSoofiS 30B-A3B, a hybrid Mamba MoE… (https://digg.com/tech/rtt1xh5r)
12. Michael Fromm on X (https://x.com/effi288/status/2075904321707798699)