Running ZAAN on a sealed laptop: air-gap mode in practice

A partner at a Swiss M&A boutique is flying to a signing. The data room is physical. Phones go in a locker. The laptop she carries may not join any network for three days, and the drafts she will mark up in that room cannot leave it. She would still like Review to read them.

That is the case air-gap mode was built for. It has been running at six firms since the autumn and is now available on request. This note explains what it is, what it is not, and how to prepare a machine.

What runs locally

Everything that matters runs on the laptop. ZAAN-7B Counsel, quantised to fit, does clause-level review and the checking pass in Draft. The firm’s playbook travels as a signed snapshot. Recall works against an exported slice of the matter index, chosen by the firm before sealing and encrypted with a key that exists only on that machine.

The hardware requirement is modest but real: 32 GB of memory and a recent processor with a neural accelerator. On that class of machine the quantised model reviews a clause in roughly 900 milliseconds, about three times slower than the hosted service. In our benchmark it agrees with the hosted model on 97% of flags; the disagreements cluster in long, nested limitation-of-liability clauses, where the smaller context window costs it something.

The Word add-in is unchanged. Severity tiers, inline redlines, citations and the trace view all work. The add-in simply talks to a local process instead of a regional endpoint.

What does not

AI Interview is not available in air-gap mode. The voice pipeline and the 38-language stack need the server. Trial & Arbitration Simulation is not available either; a tribunal, opposing counsel and three witnesses are too much to run on a laptop while a human is waiting.

Draft’s first-pass composition normally uses a larger hosted model. In air-gap mode Draft falls back to the small model for composition as well as checking. The output is competent and noticeably plainer. One partner described it as “a careful associate on a bad day”. We think that is fair.

Multilingual delivery is limited to the language packs loaded before sealing. Each pack is around 1.2 GB; most firms carry two or three.

There is no telemetry. We cannot see that the machine exists. This is the point, and it also means we cannot help diagnose a problem until the machine is back on a network and the firm chooses to send us a log bundle.

The lifecycle of a sealed machine

Preparation happens on the network. An administrator provisions the laptop from the firm’s tenant, selects the matters whose precedents should travel, and the system builds a bundle: model, playbook snapshot, index slice, language packs, add-in. The bundle is signed with the tenant key and encrypted to a key generated on the laptop itself. The administrator then confirms the seal, which disables the sync agent.

Sealed, the laptop behaves as described above. Work is stored locally, encrypted at rest with the same per-machine key, and nothing is queued for upload.

On return, the firm decides what, if anything, comes back. Nothing moves automatically. The administrator can import the matter’s redlines and drafts into the tenant as a signed bundle, or wipe the machine and import nothing. Either way the per-machine key is destroyed at unseal.

Checklist

Before sealing:

• Confirm the machine meets the memory requirement. The model will load on 16 GB and then page; reviews take ten seconds and nobody uses it.
• Choose the index slice narrowly. Ten matters, not ten years. Export time scales with size, and so does the exposure if the laptop is lost.
• Load only the language packs you will need.
• Test one real document end to end before the seal, not after.
• Record who holds the device and when it was sealed. Full-disk encryption on the operating system is a requirement, not a suggestion.

While sealed:

• Treat a lost machine as a lost machine. The bundle is encrypted, but the firm’s own incident process still applies.
• Expect slower reviews and plainer drafts. Tell the team in advance.

On return:

• Decide before unsealing whether work comes back. Importing is deliberate; there is no “sync”.
• Read the import log. Every document that re-entered the tenant is listed with a hash.
• Wipe the machine if the matter requires it. Unseal does not wipe; those are separate steps.

What we are still working on

The composition gap in Draft is the obvious one. We are testing a mid-sized model that fits on the same hardware with a smaller loss in prose quality. We are also testing a way to carry a larger Recall slice without the export taking an afternoon. Neither is ready.

Air-gap mode is not for most matters. It is for the ones where the alternative is a printed draft and a highlighter, and on those it is a real improvement.