Sovereignty and tiers

Concordance is built so that the free tier is a Digital Public Good: it can be audited to run no model and make no network connection — by construction, not by promise.

The AI-000 tier (this binary)

• No model. Concordance runs no AI. It is a deterministic citation-graph checker: same input, same output, every time.
• No network. The free build compiles without the egress feature. Every line of network code (currently none) is #[cfg(feature = "egress")] and is compile-excluded from this binary. An auditor confirms egress-freeness by inspecting the artifact — no HTTP client, no socket code is present to disable.
• On-device. Documents never leave your machine.

“It flags; it does not decide” — Concordance surfaces inconsistencies; a human reads them and signs. It makes no editorial or legal judgement.

Bring-your-own tiers

When you want AI assistance, you bring it — Concordance never ships or bundles a model:

• AI-OWN — point Concordance at your own local model, running on your own machine.
• AI-ANY — point Concordance at your own AI endpoint (an API you control and pay for).

In both, the choice of model and the compute are yours; the sovereignty of your documents and the network boundary stay under your control.

Why “by construction” matters

A tool that promises not to phone home still ships the code that could. Concordance ships a binary from which the network capability is absent: the DPG guarantee is a property of the compiled artifact you can verify yourself:

strings concordance | grep -iE 'reqwest|hyper|tokio::net|TcpStream|https?://'
# (no matches)

Any future network transport, and the bring-your-own tiers, are a separate, deliberately-built egress lane — never the default, and never in the AI-000 binary.