Sector
AI consultancy for defence
The data stays on the estate, and the network often has no internet at all. We build air-gapped inference inside your perimeter, hardened to DISA STIG and CIS Level 2, with Secure by Design evidence an accreditor will accept.
The constraint
Why defence AI programmes stall
Most commercial AI assumes internet access: a licence server, an image registry, a telemetry endpoint, a vendor pushing updates. Remove those and much of the market stops working.
In defence that does not move. At SECRET and above there is no egress; on a segregated OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE network there may as well not be. Programmes that find this out after choosing a platform usually lose a year, because the connectivity is built into the product.
Second, assurance. MOD Secure by Design puts the burden on the delivery team and its suppliers: a live security case, continuously evidenced controls, the current risk position on request. A one-off accreditation from three years ago no longer counts.
Third, supply chain. Def Stan 05-138 and DEFCON 658 put your supplier’s own controls in scope. Weights or images of uncertain provenance are a supply-chain question before a technical one.
Where it works
Where AI earns its place
Ordered roughly by how quickly they get approved. The first is usually the right first project: it is the least contentious.
Doctrine, policy and JSP retrieval
Query doctrine, JSPs, standing orders and unit instruction, cited to the governing paragraph. Non-operational, high volume, measurable. Usually the right first build.
Collected material triage
Summarise, translate and extract entities across collected and open-source material. It directs analyst attention; it does not replace analyst judgement.
Engineering and sustainment support
Retrieval across manuals, fault histories and supply data. The right procedure and part number, without three systems and a phone call.
Requirement, bid and contract analysis
Extract and compare requirement sets, ITTs and contract schedules. Unglamorous, often unclassified, often the fastest payback.
The gate
What assurance will ask for
We produce it during delivery. Cheaper, and more likely to be accurate.
- A Secure by Design security case, maintained through delivery
- NCSC CAF contributing-outcome commentary for the AI platform itself
- DISA STIG and CIS Level 2 scan output, every deviation justified in writing
- Model, container and dependency provenance, hashed at the air-gap boundary
- An offline sustainment path for models, images, signatures, licences and CVE feeds
- Logging and audit that can reconstruct any single inference
- A cross-domain transfer procedure agreed with the accreditor before the build
Questions from this sector
Can you work fully air-gapped?
Yes, and we have. Every dependency is mirrored inside the boundary: model weights, container images, package repositories, GPU driver and CUDA stack, licensing service and vulnerability feed. The question that matters is sustainment in year three. We settle it before anything is procured.
What clearance do your people hold?
Tell us the clearance level and any facility requirement in the first conversation. We will say whether we meet it as we stand, and where we would need to work alongside a cleared partner or your own staff. Vagueness here wastes months of somebody’s programme, so we are not vague.
Do you build to STIG or to CIS?
Both; they are not interchangeable. DISA STIG is the baseline for the operating system, container runtime and Kubernetes; CIS Level 2 is the benchmark profile. We reconcile them into one hardened image, built from code and scanned before handover. Where they conflict, or a control breaks GPU scheduling or drivers, the deviation is recorded with its compensating control.
Are open-weight models acceptable in a defence context?
The question is provenance. An open-weight model you have hashed, scanned and hold locally is far easier to reason about than a hosted model that changes without notice. Know exactly which artefact is running, make sure it cannot change underneath you, and be able to rebuild from your own mirror with the wire cut.
Next step
Start with a 30-minute call
No deck. Tell us the problem. We will say whether AI is the right tool, what it would take and roughly what it would cost.