Security & Compliance

Can an AI Assistant Run Fully Air-Gapped?

Yes. Platform, models, retrieval, and logs all inside your network, no internet at all. What still works, what changes, and who needs it.

Can an AI assistant run without any internet connection?

Yes. The Plainsight AI Assistant can run fully air-gapped: the platform, the models, the retrieval index, and the logs all live inside your network, with no outbound connection at all. The models are self-hosted open-weight models on your own GPUs, so nothing needs to reach a cloud API.

Air-gapped is not a stripped-down demo version. It is the same platform as every other deployment, configured for the one environment where "the data does not leave" is meant literally.

What does air-gapped mean in practice?

No outbound connections. Not for model calls, not for telemetry, not for "anonymous usage statistics". Monitoring runs in your own tooling, inside the network. If a vendor's air-gapped story includes a phone-home exception, it is not an air-gapped story.

Updates work the way they always have in isolated environments: as releases you carry inside, verify, and install on your own schedule. Slower than a cloud auto-update, and that is the point. Nothing changes in your environment without your people deciding it does.

What still works, and what changes?

Works exactly the same

AI chat with retrieval on your internal documents, citations included

Department-level isolation: separate knowledge bases and conversation histories

Data analysis and chart generation in sandboxed Python

SSO against your own identity provider

The IT admin dashboard: usage, cost, model management, audit trail

Self-hosted open-weight models like Llama and Qwen, per department

Changes by design

Web search is off. There is no web.

Cloud model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral) are unreachable by design; models run on your own GPUs

SaaS integrations are out; internal systems with APIs inside the network still connect

Platform and model updates arrive as releases you bring inside and install on your schedule

Who actually needs air-gapped?

Fewer organisations than the term's popularity suggests. Defence and its supply chain, critical infrastructure, classified government work: environments where isolation is a requirement someone else wrote down for you. If your driver is GDPR or a general sovereignty mandate, an EU tenant or a European sovereign cloud usually gets you there in days or weeks instead of months.

A pattern that works well: start connected in your own tenant so people get value now, and stand up the air-gapped environment for the teams that need it. Same platform, so nothing has to be relearned or rebuilt.

KEEP READING

AI Data Residency: What It Actually Requires

Where AI chat data actually goes, what GDPR requires, and the questions that tell you whether a vendor's residency story holds up.

What Counts as EU-Hosted AI (and What Doesn't)

An EU datacenter is not the same as EU jurisdiction. The four levels of EU-hosted AI, and how to tell marketing from architecture.

The Enterprise AI Compliance Checklist

Twelve checks your DPO and CISO will run on any enterprise AI tool. GDPR, EU AI Act, residency, access control, and audit, in one list.

Ready to see it in action?

Schedule a personalised demo and see how the Plainsight AI Assistant fits your organisation.

Request a demo