FAQ
The questions that come up in every serious evaluation, answered the way we answer them in the room.
No. Prompts, documents, embeddings, model outputs, and audit records all live and stay inside the enclosure. Egress is denied by default at the platform level; where the appliance must reach an on-premise system of yours, that route is declared explicitly and governed by policy. There is no telemetry back to Element 31 and no cloud dependency of any kind.
Frontier-class open-weight models, selected per deployment against your workload and hardware tier, then pinned at provisioning. Because the weights live on your hardware, behavior is reproducible: the model answering in month nine is the model that was accredited in month one, until a signed update deliberately changes it.
For the workloads this appliance exists for, the honest comparison is not local model versus cloud model — it is local model versus no AI at all, because the data in question was never allowed to reach a cloud model. Beyond that, deployed systems close most of the remaining gap with grounding: retrieval over your documents, adaptation on your data, and evaluation against your tasks routinely matter more than raw model size.
As complete, versioned, cryptographically signed bundles containing software and model artifacts together. They arrive over the network where one is permitted, or on physical media where one is not. The appliance verifies the signature and contents before applying anything, refuses what it cannot verify, and records what it installed. No update path bypasses the signature.
Yes — that is two of the three engagement models. The Team Appliance lets your engineers install internal applications through a governed, signed deployment path, and Platform Direct exposes the Substrate APIs with no application layer at all. In every case your software builds against one stable interface and inherits the same audit surface.
The chassis is sealed and tamper-evident, so physical intrusion leaves visible evidence. Independently, the integrity service continuously verifies the running software against its signed manifest and writes every deviation to an append-only local log — so both the physical event and any software consequence are on the record for your security team.
Your people. The appliance is designed to be run like any other piece of secured infrastructure: your operators control physical access, power, and update cadence, and your administrators manage workspaces and policy. Element 31's ongoing role is sustainment — building, signing, and delivering update bundles, with engineering support behind them.
Anywhere you control: data centers, secure facilities, industrial sites, and disconnected or intermittently connected environments. The appliance operates fully air-gapped indefinitely — connectivity is an option, never a requirement. Hardware tiers cover fixed-site and space-constrained deployments.
Like infrastructure, not like a utility: no per-token metering, no per-seat licenses. The configured appliance is priced once, and that figure is offered under three structures — direct purchase, lease, or installments — so the same capability fits either a capital or an operating budget. The platform license is included in all three. The structures are laid out in full on the pricing page.
Operationally, no. The appliance runs without any connection to us — it does not phone home, and nothing about its daily operation requires our systems to exist. What Element 31 provides on an ongoing basis is sustainment: signed update bundles for platform, models, and security patches. You choose whether and when to apply them.