Mozilla’s for-profit arm just fired a shot across the bow of enterprise AI giants. MZLA Technologies, the outfit behind Thunderbird, unveiled Thunderbolt on April 16, 2026—a self-hosted, open-source AI client pitched as the antidote to vendor lock-in from the likes of Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT Enterprise. Businesses weary of piping sensitive data through OpenAI or Anthropic servers now have a ready alternative. The Register captured MZLA CEO Ryan Sipes laying it out plain: “The problem we are solving today is one of sovereignty and control. Do you really want to build your AI workflows on top of a proprietary service from OpenAI or Anthropic … not to mention having all your internal company data flowing through their systems?” Thunderbolt isn’t some bare-bones chat interface. It acts as an extensible workspace for chat, search, research, and automation. Users pick their models—frontier commercial ones, open-source locals, or on-prem setups.…