Could we have a bit more "who and where" on this please? "Relax.ai by Civo", great, who are Civo? Where's the datacenter? What's the corporate structure? UK resident founders?
btw, you can claim "relax" name instead of "relaxai" on pypi
pypi.org/project/relax is abandoned library, which owner registered via email with expired custom domain, so you can claim this domain and reset owner's account by email.
Don't think you'd have much luck convincing say a German that they shouldn't use Mistral because it isn't German sovereign. But you might have luck with that line against china or america.
Or put differently depends more on the fault lines in public perception than strict borders
Some people might interpret this comment as political commentary, but it’s actually just the reality of what people are saying and doing.
There’s a lot of data to suggest that America’s recent policy of reducing its soft power around the World & decoupling itself from alignment with interests of allies is causing increased interest and prioritisation of sovereign capability across tech, defence, public health and policy programs.
This was a campaign strategy/promise for the US President. I’m not going to comment on whether it’s good for the US or for the allies, but I will note it could have been better anticipated by all: the only real surprise is the speed and depth.
It raises some interesting questions - it’s one thing to say you don’t want Microsoft or Starlink in your infra tech stack, or don’t want to use AWS or GCP, but where does the line stop? Does the UK get out of Trident? Does the UN General Assembly get out of New York? No idea, but the fact these are conversations probably happening right now is remarkable.
>This was a campaign strategy/promise for the US President.
I don't remember seeing "if you elect me I'll destroy NATO, threaten allies, and make sure even USA's oldest allies hate us" as part of the campaign.
Perhaps you could link that promise from the time before the election?
As to your questions, I think people are hoping that rule of law returns and there is an outbreak of common sense. No-one really expected US president will align with Russia and a cult of pseudo-Christian white-supremacist nationalists will worship him as the second coming as an expectation. That the Senate, SC, and tech leaders have fallen in place behind that (the latter literally paying fealty to their god-king) is complete insanity.
It is if your country isn't in the US and (a) GDPR requires data residency in UK/EU; (b) you're concerned about capricious actions by the US govt cutting off access to US-controlled services (cloud, payments systems, etc).
US tech is currently being weaponized against the ICC and its member judges in Europe[1], and the US is threatening to annex Greenland, as a result all (former) US allies are scrambling to get rid of their strategic dependency.
Personal take: terrible name. RelaxAI feels like you trawled for available .ai domains with dictionary words and landed on this. But it doesn't work, unless it's a relaxed AI. Is it slower, but cheaper, we'll process your requests when we get to them, so relax!
You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that!
We built a UK sovereign inference provider for developers who are either paying too much for OpenAI/Claude tokens or can't use US hyperscalers due to data residency requirements.
The short version: drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, latest open source models (Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Nemotron 3 Super, GPT OSS 120b), running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK. Zero code changes to switch from OpenAI. Up to 80% cheaper per token cost saving!
We built it on fully UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, so data never leaves UK jurisdiction. For anyone building in regulated sectors — finance, legal, health, defence — that matters a lot. But honestly, most of our early users just came for the huge cost savings.
We're looking for developers to kick the tyres. Check out our API docs at relax.ai/docs. I'd love your feedback and happy to answer any questions.
Firstly, congrats! As a Brit this looks cool, and I'm happy to see it. I wish you every success.
Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.
Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.
I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.
If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!
Sovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug. Who cares where it was copied from?
If it were somehow legal for a company to provide MS Office (not a clone) fully in the UK with no control from Microsoft, that would also count as a sovereign capability, even though none of the code was written in the uk.
Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
Hey Ben. I find communication like this fairly off-putting. In so far the 80% cheaper per token (or any part of it) is something of your own making/ingenuity, by all means, do tell, but it requires comparing token cost fairly with comparable models on i.e. OpenRouter and not across different models and pretending it's the same thing.
The problem is if those GPUs are running on an AWS server (or any other American provider), even if it the server is in the UK the sovereignty claim is null and void.
Is your business plan essentially to run mid tier models on hardware in the UK?
I do see the value in this as some enterprises need local data residency, the UK energy grid realistically can't handle new multi GW xAI-style data centres, and many applications don't need frontier models (but do need more than small local ones).
So the pricing is 12.50/month for unlimited chat, or 60p per million tokens output/10p per million input? For use with a coding assistant it would be the latter?
I'd expect for workflows where there is value in knowing that the data is processed in the UK. From a contractual/data protection standpoint, that could be very useful, depending on the use case.
UK sovereign data? Land of arrests for posts on social media? Member of five eyes, "you spy on our citizens and we'll spy on yours and call it intelligence sharing"? Land of the infamous Online Safety act? That UK? Why would anyone want their data in the UK?
Lack of links.
It's a common annoyance when subsections of a site fail to link back to the parent.
pypi.org/project/relax is abandoned library, which owner registered via email with expired custom domain, so you can claim this domain and reset owner's account by email.
Don't think you'd have much luck convincing say a German that they shouldn't use Mistral because it isn't German sovereign. But you might have luck with that line against china or america.
Or put differently depends more on the fault lines in public perception than strict borders
Some people might interpret this comment as political commentary, but it’s actually just the reality of what people are saying and doing.
There’s a lot of data to suggest that America’s recent policy of reducing its soft power around the World & decoupling itself from alignment with interests of allies is causing increased interest and prioritisation of sovereign capability across tech, defence, public health and policy programs.
This was a campaign strategy/promise for the US President. I’m not going to comment on whether it’s good for the US or for the allies, but I will note it could have been better anticipated by all: the only real surprise is the speed and depth.
It raises some interesting questions - it’s one thing to say you don’t want Microsoft or Starlink in your infra tech stack, or don’t want to use AWS or GCP, but where does the line stop? Does the UK get out of Trident? Does the UN General Assembly get out of New York? No idea, but the fact these are conversations probably happening right now is remarkable.
I don't remember seeing "if you elect me I'll destroy NATO, threaten allies, and make sure even USA's oldest allies hate us" as part of the campaign.
Perhaps you could link that promise from the time before the election?
As to your questions, I think people are hoping that rule of law returns and there is an outbreak of common sense. No-one really expected US president will align with Russia and a cult of pseudo-Christian white-supremacist nationalists will worship him as the second coming as an expectation. That the Senate, SC, and tech leaders have fallen in place behind that (the latter literally paying fealty to their god-king) is complete insanity.
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
The UK it seems has dropped the ball on the whole training and building models part, although we are punching up in other areas now.
We really need to get our own equivalent to Mistral, and fast!
BTW don’t see opencode in the docs yet much less known tools are?
If I can run those models on my consumer hardware, I'd better believe they are 80% cheaper than the models that need 1 TB of RAM.
Input Price: £1.17 Output Price: £2.33
So, slightly cheaper than Fireworks AI
come on now
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBBB-m9peMQ
You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that!
this is a joke, right?
Can the user choose which sovereign is doing the computation?
I'd personally prefer not to have the weird uncle do the computation, maybe the younger ones living abroad can do it.
;)
I have no idea why you got downvoted so much.
We built a UK sovereign inference provider for developers who are either paying too much for OpenAI/Claude tokens or can't use US hyperscalers due to data residency requirements.
The short version: drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, latest open source models (Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Nemotron 3 Super, GPT OSS 120b), running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK. Zero code changes to switch from OpenAI. Up to 80% cheaper per token cost saving!
We built it on fully UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, so data never leaves UK jurisdiction. For anyone building in regulated sectors — finance, legal, health, defence — that matters a lot. But honestly, most of our early users just came for the huge cost savings.
We're looking for developers to kick the tyres. Check out our API docs at relax.ai/docs. I'd love your feedback and happy to answer any questions.
Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.
Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.
I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.
If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!
If it were somehow legal for a company to provide MS Office (not a clone) fully in the UK with no control from Microsoft, that would also count as a sovereign capability, even though none of the code was written in the uk.
Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
I assume UK based DCs, so why not just say that, UK based LLM inference.
Is it a DC owned/ran by HM Gov? Is that why it's sovereign?
Not a criticism, more of a critique.
I do see the value in this as some enterprises need local data residency, the UK energy grid realistically can't handle new multi GW xAI-style data centres, and many applications don't need frontier models (but do need more than small local ones).
Token prices should be in $ as that's how our brains work