Hi, we’re Advanced Cognitive Systems Lab, a privately owned, not-for-profit AI research company based in Karlsruhe, Germany.

As the world turns into turmoil, the race for some vague ’superintelligences‘ becomes fueled by top-level geopolitical interest. At the same time, it becomes obvious that transformer-centric model architectures are hitting a plateau.

In that particular constellation of multidimensional interest and multinational competition, AI security and alignment tends to be seen as a burden which, as some people argue, needs to be overcome. We couldn’t disagree more!

In our view, AI ’strength‘ alone is never enough. Without structure, strength becomes brittle. Without reliability, it becomes a risk. Without control, it ceases to serve.

For us, building advanced intelligence means building something that stays accountable to us as humans — in every moment, under every condition. Structure and control are essential if AI technology is to serve as a foundation for meaningful and sustainable economic value.

We strive to combine cognitive performance with structure and control. This is our foundational motivation and our most noble guiding principle.

At ACSL, we run foundational research to advance today’s model-centric AI architectures into architecturally grounded ‚Thinking Machines‘ based on our innovative Leibniz-von-Neumann-Architecture — a specific blueprint for compound system structures that embrace the strengths of language model technology, while overcoming their structural limits around safety, reliability, and human control. Read our initial positioning paper.

We work closely with our shareholder, embraceable Technology, whose Enterprise AI Tech Stack, including the first real-life implementations of the Leibniz-von-Neumann-Architecture (called e1 & e2), allow us to test and evaluate what safe, controlled, and sovereign AI can become.

The first results — both on benchmarking level and real-life use cases — look more than promising, and we are pushing hard to intensify our work on all related aspects.

We have founded ACSL because we believe humans must remain in control at all times — and because we refuse to settle for less than machine intelligence that likewise earns our admiration and our trust.

Because we are still in control.

Now is the time.

Karlsruhe, August 2025.
The ACSL Team.