Sovereign AI Governance at Community Scale: An EU Policy Brief

Most EU community organisations will meet the AI Act by accepting their existing vendor's defaults. The vendor determines the model, the data-handling posture, and the jurisdictional routing of every query. The community organisation inherits all of this by signing a procurement form. This is not compliance; it is delegation. This brief describes an alternative already in production. The Village platform — built around a three-layer constitutional architecture that anchors community values in the platform's code, and a Situated Language Layer trained on the community's own authorised material — offers, in whole or in part, a solution to many of the cases where vendor delegation fails. The brief sets out three mechanisms (Situated Language Layer, Guardian Agents, Federation), maps each to the EU regulatory hook it engages (AI Act Articles 2 and 50, the European Media Freedom Act, GDPR Article 9, DSA, CLOUD Act), and describes the structural audit criteria an adopting community or business can run for itself before taking any module on. The toolkit was built under Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations to Māori communities in New Zealand, where data sovereignty is a constitutional commitment between the Crown and iwi, not a regulatory preference. Meeting that constraint required an architecture in which values are anchored in code rather than in marketing copy; the same architecture answers the obligations EU organisations face. This brief is a policy-audience derivative of the parent whitepaper “Distributive Equity Through Structure” (Stroh, 2026; doi:10.5281/zenodo.19600614), with the same scholarly provenance but translated into the regulatory register of EU community organisations, small businesses, nationally-affiliated membership bodies with local chapters, minority-language communities, and their policy advisors. English and German versions included in this deposit.