Risk & safety
Where Does It Run?
Every AI system has a venue, and the venue determines where your data goes, what breaks, what it costs, and what it can do.
Venue = where the rules run + where the model runs
The two parts can live in different places. Whether local is good enough for your work is measurable, so benchmark it rather than guess.
The common hybrid - a wrapper on your server, a frontier model at the end of an API.
Full control, running a local model on your own hardware.
Rules on your own server does not keep your data home. Every request travels to wherever the model lives - if the model sits in someone else's cloud, so does everything you send it.
Venue is usually decided on the way to building. If contracts or your regulator say certain data never leaves the building, venue is the first filter - applied before you choose what to automate.
You've met this in miniature: The Three Tiers of AI Privacy - consumer cloud, enterprise cloud, local - is the data view of venue, and the place to start when you're buying rather than building. This card is the decision behind it: where each of the two parts sits, and everything that follows from that. Not the Three Ways: the Ways describe your relationship to the system; venue describes where its two parts sit. Either can change while the other stays put.
When to use Before building anything that moves past product. If you're regulated, before choosing what to automate at all.
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