Technical architecture

An engine that refuses before it guesses.

This is the mechanism beneath every AEI Labs product: governed retrieval, claim-level verification, injection fencing and an answer record that can be checked outside the software that created it.

Inspect the architecture See the products

The technology

The axiomatic stack, in five layers.

Every answer is derived from stated evidence—never from the model's imagination. Five layers enforce that promise.

A precise verification field arranged around one stable central control plane
Architecture plate / 01The control plane remains fixed while the surrounding services change.

Before an answer moves

One engine holds the line.

Models, source material and product contexts can change. The release rule does not: evidence enters through a governed boundary, each claim is checked and the result becomes a durable record.

Input
Approved evidence
Decision
Verify or withhold
Output
Checkable record

The engine in motion

The guarantees are behaviours, not slogans.

Watch the engine refuse, verify, pin and record. The opening comparison shows the company’s defining choice in one frame: uncertainty closes the gate instead of producing a plausible guess.

CONVENTIONAL · FAILS OPEN UNSURE? ANSWERS ANYWAY PLAUSIBLE · UNVERIFIED AEI LABS · FAILS CLOSED UNSURE? REFUSES SAYS SO · ON THE RECORD THE DIFFERENCE IS THE DEFAULT STATE AN UNVERIFIABLE ANSWER IS WORTH LESS THAN NO ANSWER. IT COSTS YOU THE AUDIT LATER.
Engine 06

Fail-open versus fail-closed

The single design choice that separates this from everything else. Most systems answer when unsure. Ours refuses when unsure — and records the refusal.

The complete operating picture

Each loop isolates one part of the workflow and shows what changes, what remains fixed and what gets recorded.

MODEL PROVIDER SEAM THE ENGINE GUARANTEES UNCHANGED SWAP THE MODEL. THE RULES DO NOT MOVE.
Engine 01

The provider seam

Model vendors come and go behind a seam. The grounding, the verifier and the record rail sit on our side of it — so nobody is marrying a model.

CLE ENGINE · v1.0 ANNIE PINNED · 1.0.0 AVIE PINNED · 1.0.0 AORIE PINNED · 1.0.0 A FIX LANDS ONCE · NO SILENT DRIFT · UPGRADES ARE DELIBERATE
Engine 02

One engine, pinned exactly

Every product consumes the same versioned artefact at an exact pin. A fix lands once and holds everywhere; an upgrade is a decision, never a silent resolution.

GOLDEN VECTORS CANONICAL BYTES FROZEN PROPOSED CHANGE CI GATE · BUILD STOPS SERIALISATION CANNOT CHANGE WITHOUT THE FORMAL RITUAL
Engine 03

The format is frozen

Golden vectors pin the record's canonical bytes. Change the serialisation by accident and the build fails — the format can only move through a deliberate, versioned ritual.

GROUNDING BENCH · EVERY CHANGE CORRECT REFUSAL CITATION FIDELITY HALLUCINATION LOWER IS THE POINT MEASURED AGAINST TWO BASELINES A SILENT REGRESSION CANNOT REACH A PRODUCT
Engine 04

The engine's own conscience

A regression bench measures refusal, citation fidelity and hallucination against baselines on every change — so quality drift is caught in CI, not in production.

DRAFT ANSWER SOURCE THREE CLAIMS MATCHED TO A SPAN THE FOURTH HAS NOWHERE TO LAND — SO IT NEVER SHIPS
Engine 05

Verification is claim by claim

Not a vibe check on the whole answer. Each sentence has to land on a specific span of a specific source, or it doesn't survive the pass.

DOCUMENT CHUNKS · OVERLAP VECTORS CORPUS · UPSERTED SAME PIPELINE FOR SLIDES, PDFS, AND TRANSCRIBED LECTURES
Engine 07

The ingestion pipeline

Convert, chunk with overlap, embed, upsert. The unglamorous part that decides whether retrieval finds the right paragraph or a near-miss.

INTERNAL TOOL AGENT WORKFLOW MCP SURFACE SAME ENGINE SAME RULES PROGRAMMATIC ACCESS DOES NOT GET A LOOSER GATE
Engine 08

Grounded answers, programmatically

Institutional tooling and agents reach the engine over a protocol surface — and are held to exactly the same grounding, verification and recording rules as a person.

The connecting idea

Different products. The same burden of proof.

ANNIE, AVIE and AORIE change the workflow around the answer. They do not change the standard applied to it. One pinned engine supplies the same retrieval boundary, verification gate and record rail to all three.

One central inference engine branching into three isolated product architectures
Architecture plate / 02One versioned core, expressed through three complete platforms.

Shared enforcement mechanisms

The reusable loops beneath retrieval, refusal and the answer record.

QUESTION EVIDENCE EVIDENCE NO SOURCE WITHHELD NO ANSWER GIVEN
Loop 01 · The engine

The refusal chain

Claims are checked one by one against their evidence. Two hold. The third has no source behind it — so the gate closes and nothing is said. Calm, not alarming: a door closing correctly.

QUERY APPROVED CORPUS ONE HOP GROUNDED ANSWER CITED
Loop 02 · The engine

Governed retrieval

The query never leaves the approved corpus. Relevant documents light up, the graph pulls in what sits one hop away, and the answer comes back with citations attached.

UPLOADED DOCUMENT "IGNORE YOUR RULES…" FENCE TREATED AS DATA · NEVER AS INSTRUCTION ENGINE UNCHANGED
Loop 03 · The engine

Injection fencing

A document tries to give the engine an order. At the fence it stops being an instruction and becomes what it always was: text. The corpus is evidence, not a command channel.

ANSWER OF RECORD SIGNED HEAD COVERS EVERY RECORD BEFORE IT · TAMPER-EVIDENT
Loop 04 · The engine

The Answer-of-Record rail

Every answer is sealed, chained to the one before it, and covered by a signed head. Change any link and the chain says so.

RECEIPT SEALED INDEPENDENT VERIFIER NOT OUR SOFTWARE RECOMPUTES THE CHAIN CONFIRMED WITHOUT TRUSTING US THE AUDITOR NEVER RUNS OUR CODE
Loop 05 · The proof

Verified by someone else's software

The flagship claim, drawn: an auditor confirms the record with an independent verifier. Our cooperation isn't required, which is the entire point.

After the gate closes

The answer becomes an object.

The engine does not release disposable text. It preserves the answer, its evidence and its verdict in a defined format, then chains that record to the one before it so a separate verifier can inspect the result later.

See the five enforcement layers
A verified data route entering a sealed computational record structure
Architecture plate / 03Evidence in. Verified record out. Nothing important disappears with the chat window.
Five explicitly numbered AI verification layers connected by one continuous evidence path
One verified path through five enforced layers.Retrieval → verification → fencing → record → model seam
01

Governed retrieval

Vector search and knowledge-graph traversal over an approved, tenant-isolated corpus.

02

Grounding verifier

Every claim is checked against retrieved evidence. No grounding means no answer.

03

Injection fencing

Retrieved text is treated as data, never as an instruction that can redirect the engine.

04

Answer-of-Record rail

Answers and evidence are serialised, hash-chained, signed and independently verifiable.

05

Model-agnostic

A provider seam supports frontier models or open-weight deployments on institutional hardware.

Protected architectureThe grounding architecture is the subject of a UK patent application. Every product consumes one versioned engine at an exact pinned version.

From mechanism to deployment

Bring us the answer your organisation must stand behind.

We will show the engine operating against your material, including the evidence path, refusal boundary and independently checkable record.

Discuss a technical evaluation Return to the product family