A manifesto is only worth the products under it.

We are Phareau Labs. A social-interest lab. Not a charity and not a foundation. A company with a mission, hungry but not gluttonous. We grow honestly. We refuse growth that takes from people. A steward-ownership structure holds us to that, now and after any later funding, so the company cannot drift toward taking what is not ours.

The last era of technology was built somewhere else. We adopted it, we depended on it and we paid for it. The value left the continent. The data left too. We were users. We were rarely owners. We do not say this with resentment. We say it as a fact, and a fact can be changed.

A new era is now being built underneath the economy and ordinary daily life. The question is not whether Europe uses it. The question is who builds it, under whose rules and for whose benefit. If the answer is the same as last time, Europe will once more rent what it could have owned. We believe the next era should be built in Europe, by Europe, for the society it serves. Not extracted from it.

Here is the proof.

We research. Where the EU sets a position, we follow it with action and participation, not commentary. We call this applied policy. Some markets need an actor with no angle beyond the public good, and that is the part we are built to play.

We build. Europe wants home-grown technology on open foundations, so we build the reference implementation and the standards new European builders can build with. Project Talaria is our answer. An open standard for proportional inference that keeps the AI work which does not need a frontier datacentre on European compute that already sits idle in European homes. Providers cut their per-token cost. Every token stays under EU jurisdiction. The spec is CC-BY-4.0, the implementation Apache-2.0, adoption free of any fee, forever. Strategic autonomy here is an engineering requirement, not a phrase.

We steward. The basics stay open source, always. Builders take them further. Everyone else gets a clean fallback that simply works. Phareau Kit is the everyday face of this. Finished apps given away free, fully on device, no account, no tracking, no calls home. We start with Reflections for daily reflection and Pia for flashcards. A comparable app charges up to around €140 a year for what a phone can already do. Ours is free, because the basics should not be locked behind a subscription.

We open. Public by default. We do not sell data and we never will. Every product meets the GDPR and the EU AI Act from day one, no exceptions. Privacy is built into the product. It is not a setting you have to find.

Look at what those four verbs have in common. None is a promise about intent. Each is a thing already running. Talaria routes real tokens. Reflections sits on a real phone making no calls home. That is the test we hold ourselves to, and the test we invite you to hold us to.

Phareau means lighthouse. A lighthouse does not own the sea or charge the ships. It keeps the light on. So do we. We keep the light on for anyone. We ask other European builders to take what we have made and go further.