StenoAI for Defence
Planning sessions, programme reviews and sensitive debriefs. Capture, transcribe and summarise on the device in the room, or on servers inside your own boundary. Local mode keeps working when the network is unavailable.
01 / Where it is used
Illustrative settings · 8Settings where the conversation can’t be handed to a cloud vendor, and the record StenoAI produces in each, on your device or your infrastructure.
Planning conversations that never touch a vendor's cloud.
ForStaff officers, planning groups, HQ cells
A first AAR draft straight from the debrief.
ForAircrew, unit commanders, exercise staff
Works when there is no network at all.
ForDeployed headquarters, forward teams
No bandwidth needed once you sail.
ForShips' companies, embarked staffs
Every move, and the reasoning behind it.
ForStaff colleges, wargame and red cells
Multilingual rooms, one record you hold.
ForLiaison officers, multinational headquarters
Programme reviews stay on hardware you control.
ForProgramme offices, industry partners
Runs fully local, with no content egress.
ForSecurity authorities, IT and accreditation teams
02 / Why now · Public record
Verified October 2026Planning doctrine expects someone to keep the record. Experimentation assumes the network will fail. And the costliest losses happen when a copy leaves the system it belongs in.
Nov 2024 US Army FM 5-0
Planning doctrine has recorders capture coordinating instructions, subunit tasks and the information needed to synchronise an operation. A disconnected laptop can be a second recorder; the human recorder keeps the pen.
Mar 2026 US Army experimentation
Army experimentation replicated jamming, signal interference and limited bandwidth expected against a peer threat. Once models are installed, StenoAI's local pipeline needs no network at all.
Jul 2025 UK Ministry of Defence
The Defence Secretary told Parliament that a Defence official had emailed an ARAP caseworking file outside authorised government systems in February 2022.
03 / Structural risk
3 pointsRun it on one laptop, on a model server inside your network, or in your own cloud tenancy. Local mode also works on air-gapped and disconnected systems.
Audio stays on the machine. Transcripts and summaries stay on it too in local mode, or go only to a model server you run inside the enclave. There is no vendor in the data flow.
In local mode, transcription (Parakeet, Whisper) and summarisation run on your hardware, with no external inference service in the path.
MIT-licensed source your security authority can review and build in a controlled environment.
04 / Law & policy
Verified October 2026Where controlled data may go is decided by contract and policy, not by the tool. These are the clauses a security authority will check, and where the design helps.
05 / Case files · Public record
Verified September 2026The pattern is consistent: the compromise happens at a link in the chain that isn't yours. A contractor's system, a vendor's build server, a file that left the enclave and couldn't be recalled.
Case 01 UK Ministry of Defence, Afghan relocations · 2022, disclosed 2025
In February 2022 a member of staff at UK Special Forces headquarters emailed out a dataset holding the names and details of roughly 19,000 Afghans who had applied for relocation under ARAP. It was not discovered until August 2023, when part of it surfaced in a Facebook group. The government obtained an unprecedented superinjunction that kept the breach — and a secret resettlement scheme built in response — out of public view until July 2025.
What StenoAI changes
Nothing was hacked. A copy was made and sent, and it could not be recalled. StenoAI cannot stop a person emailing a file, and doesn't claim to — but it adds no copies of its own: no vendor-side duplicate, no automatic sync, no export step in the pipeline. Recordings, transcripts and summaries are ordinary local files, held under whatever controls you already run on that machine.
Case 02 UK MoD payroll provider · 2024
Disclosed to Parliament in May 2024: an external payroll system operated by contractor Shared Services Connected Ltd was accessed by what the Defence Secretary called a malign actor, exposing names and bank details of up to around 270,000 serving personnel, reservists and veterans. The MoD's own networks were not the entry point — the third party's system was.
What StenoAI changes
Defence security is bounded by the least-defended system holding the data, and that system frequently belongs to someone else. Every SaaS notetaker adds one. StenoAI adds none: there is no vendor holding your meeting content, so there is no vendor to breach.
Case 03 SolarWinds Orion · 2020
An actor the US government attributed to Russia's SVR compromised SolarWinds' build process and planted a backdoor in signed Orion updates shipped between March and June 2020. CISA issued Emergency Directive 21-01 ordering federal civilian agencies to disconnect the product; agencies including Treasury, Commerce and DHS were breached through it.
What StenoAI changes
StenoAI does not make supply-chain risk disappear — no software does, and any vendor claiming otherwise is selling you something. What it removes is the standing data flow a compromise could ride: StenoAI makes no network calls with your meeting content, so there is no established channel out. And it is MIT-licensed, so your security authority can review the source and build it themselves rather than trusting a binary.
Each incident is a matter of public record, summarised from the linked source and verified September 2026. StenoAI is not affiliated with any organisation named here.
06 / Deployment postures
Device → network → tenancyOne application, three ways to run it. The product doesn’t change; the network around it does, and so does exactly what we can claim.
Posture 01 Single device
The whole pipeline runs on one managed laptop.
What holdsIn local mode, meeting content never leaves the device.
Posture 02 Isolated network
Endpoints record and transcribe locally. Transcript text, never audio, goes to a model server you run on the same network, such as Ollama or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so larger models can run on your GPUs.
What holdsAudio stays on the device. Transcript text stays on your network.
Posture 03 Connected
Where the classification allows, summaries run in your organisation's own cloud account, such as AWS Bedrock or your OpenAI or Anthropic agreement, or through your organisation's gateway so desktops never hold provider keys.
What holdsStenoAI runs no server that receives meeting content.
Use in any classified space needs your accrediting authority’s approval of the device and the audio capture. Accreditation is a function of your own deployment and authorisation process, not the app alone.
On compliance
In local mode, StenoAI runs entirely on your device. Your meeting recordings, transcripts, and summaries never reach our servers — there is no third-party processor handling your meeting data, which addresses a meaningful part of HIPAA, GDPR, and data-residency exposure. (Those frameworks also cover safeguards, agreements, and processes that remain your responsibility — no tool hands you compliance.) StenoAI itself isn't a certified cloud service, because there is no cloud service handling your meetings to certify — and that's the point: the vendor-breach risk that frameworks such as SOC 2 exist to assure against isn't in that path.
07 / Questions
Both. Summaries can run on a model server inside your network or in your own cloud tenancy, with transcription on the device by default. In local mode, after the one-time model download, everything runs with no network connection at all.
No. StenoAI runs no server that receives meeting content. In local mode recordings, transcripts and summaries stay as files on your device; if you configure a model server, content goes only to the endpoint you run or choose.
Yes. It's open source, so it can be audited and built from source in your own environment before deployment.
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