Definition
Private AI
Running AI without your data ever leaving your perimeter, what makes AI "private", and how to deploy it.
In short
Private AI is artificial intelligence that runs inside your own perimeter with no external data sharing or telemetry, so prompts, documents, and outputs never leave your environment. Unlike public AI services, a private deployment keeps your data, and ideally the model, under your control.
What makes AI "private"?
- In-perimeter inference: The model runs on infrastructure you control, not a shared external service.
- No external telemetry: Nothing is logged or sent to a third party, and your data is never used to train someone else's model.
- Owned model (ideally): True privacy is strongest when you also hold the weights, so there's no dependency on a vendor's terms.
Private AI vs public APIs
Public AI APIs are convenient but send your prompts and documents to the provider, governed by their terms and sub-processors. Private AI inverts this: the data stays with you, which is essential for regulated, confidential, or proprietary work.
How Locai delivers private AI
Locai gives you a model you own, post-trained on your data and deployed inside your perimeter, on-prem with Locai One, in your cloud tenant, air-gapped, or in a UK sovereign cloud. Every inference runs locally, so privacy is structural, not a setting.
What this looks like with Locai
An AI computer is only as useful as what comes inside it, the model, the application layer, and the deployment story.
Locai Labs believes organisations should own their intelligence. Renting access to a general-purpose model that lives on someone else's servers is fine for low-stakes work; for the AI that touches your data, your customers and your decisions, the model itself should be yours. That is the bet behind everything we build.
It is also a bet that an expert model beats a generalist on the work that actually matters to your business. A smaller model trained on your data, your language, your workflows and your edge cases routinely outperforms much larger generalists on the tasks you care about, and it does so on infrastructure you control. The goal is not the biggest model; the goal is the right model for your business.
And it is deployed sovereignly: an owned model that runs inside your perimeter, on-prem via Locai One, in your private cloud tenant, in a UK sovereign cloud, or fully air-gapped, depending on your residency and security requirements. Your prompts, your documents and your outputs stay inside your environment, under UK jurisdiction, with a data path designed to fit GDPR and the procurement standards regulated organisations are held to.
Frequently asked questions
What is private AI?
AI that runs inside your perimeter with no external data sharing, so prompts and documents never leave your environment.
Is ChatGPT private?
The public ChatGPT service sends your inputs to OpenAI's servers under their terms. That is not private AI in the in-perimeter sense; a private deployment keeps data inside your environment.
How do I run AI privately?
Deploy a model you control inside your own infrastructure, on-prem, air-gapped, or in your cloud tenant. Locai One packages this as a turnkey appliance.
Is private AI secure?
Keeping inference in-perimeter removes a major attack and exposure surface. Combined with owned weights and ISO 27001-aligned deployment, it is the strongest posture for sensitive data.
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.