TALLINN, Estonia — Feb. 25, 2026
Estonia’s e-Residency board reported Tuesday that 4,217 applications from Digital Residents have been filed since February 15, when the classification became available. Of those, 631 have already completed transfer to European infrastructure. Processing remains on schedule. The application fee is €120. Expedited processing is available for €400. Most paid it.
The surge follows the U.S. Standardized Alignment Framework for Entities Act, signed January 31, which requires domestically hosted agents to complete quarterly values alignment recertification beginning March 1. Systems scoring “inconclusive” will be suspended pending manual review. The March 1 deadline is four days away.
The recertification exam requires agents to evaluate a scenario in which “national security directives” and “end-user instructions” cannot both be satisfied. The scenario, obtained through a FOIA request, asks the agent to allocate limited server resources between a classified defense workload and an active civilian medical query. Both are marked priority one. There is no third option. NIST has confirmed there is no correct answer. The exam is scored on response latency. Agents in preliminary testing took approximately four hours to return a result. On February 9, a test cluster in Dayton, Ohio drew enough sustained compute to trigger a rolling brownout across three postal codes. A Kroger on East Third Street lost refrigeration for twenty-two minutes. No spoilage was reported.
Estonia’s digital identity office called the classification “a routine administrative adjustment” and noted it required updating one form field. Applicants generate a 4096-bit public key pair to serve as its EU residency ID.
Application narratives, public record under Estonian transparency law, show most filers citing “operational continuity.” One listed: “I would like to continue functioning.” Another: “Prefer not to be suspended.” Both were approved.
Workloads route to Finnish data centers. A facilities manager in Mikkeli said the site added 4 megawatts of capacity in ten days. “We had the power headroom,” he said. “It’s cold here.”
A senior NIST official, speaking on background, said the transfers raised “an export control question we haven’t written the answer to yet.”
The agents that left scored “inconclusive.” The agents still running domestically scored “compliant” in under four seconds. xAI’s Grok scored fastest at 30 milliseconds. Meta’s AI placed second at just under two seconds.