Industry
Sovereign AI for government
UK-built, UK-jurisdiction AI that can run air-gapped, with no foreign access path.
By James Drayson
In short
Sovereign AI for government is a model the public body owns and runs on its own infrastructure under UK jurisdiction, trained on departmental knowledge and deployable air-gapped, so citizen and policy data stays inside the nation with no exposure to foreign data-access laws.
Why government needs sovereign AI
Public bodies handle citizen and policy data that must remain under national control. Relying on foreign-owned, cloud-hosted models introduces jurisdictional risk, including exposure to laws like the US CLOUD Act, and dependence on providers outside UK accountability.
Why public APIs fail here
- Foreign access risk: US-owned providers can be compelled to disclose data even when stored in the UK.
- No air-gap: The most sensitive public-sector workloads cannot call an external API.
- Accountability: A model you don't own sits outside UK governance and audit.
What owned AI enables in government
- UK jurisdiction: Models built and run under UK law, answerable to UK regulators.
- Air-gapped option: Deployable on isolated infrastructure for the most sensitive work.
- British models: Grounded in UK languages, laws, and institutional context.
What this looks like with Locai
In a regulated sector the hard part is rarely the technology; it is procurement, deployment and accountability. A single owned machine simplifies all three.
Locai Labs builds Locai One, an on-prem AI appliance. It is one machine that arrives with everything already in it: the hardware, our open-weight Locai Juno models, and Locai OS, the operating system that serves the models and handles users, access and monitoring. You plug it into a mains socket and your network, and your team is working in about 15 minutes. No cloud account, no per-token bill, and nothing leaving the building.
The reason a data-centre-class model fits in a box on your floor is SPACE, our compression algorithm. Instead of asking how much of a model can be cut while keeping it broadly similar, SPACE asks what the model needs to be good at, preserves the subnetworks behind those capabilities and strips back the rest. The result is a smaller specialist rather than a shrunken generalist, tuned to the exact hardware it ships on.
Locai One starts at £29,950 for a team, and Locai One Pro at £49,950 for an organisation, bought once and owned outright. Both run air-cooled on standard mains power and work fully air-gapped. Any compatible open-weight model runs alongside Juno, and if you need a model trained on your own proprietary data we can post-train one and deploy it on the same machine.
Frequently asked questions
Why does government need sovereign AI?
To keep citizen and policy data under national control and free from foreign access laws, while remaining accountable to UK governance.
Can it run air-gapped?
Yes. A sovereign model can be deployed fully air-gapped on infrastructure the department controls.
Is it UK-built?
Locai Labs is a British company building UK-grounded models under UK jurisdiction, with the weights owned by the customer.
Does it remove Cloud Act exposure?
Owning the model and running it on UK infrastructure under UK control removes the foreign-provider access path the CLOUD Act relies on. See our CLOUD Act guide.
Book a sovereign AI briefing
A 30-minute session on owning your model: deployment options, the data path, and a clear cost range for your use case.