Does Agency need the internet?
No. E31 Agency runs on the Czar appliance in the customer's rack. Design, publishing, runs, review, and the record all work with no outside connection.
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IN SHORT
No. E31 Agency runs on the Czar appliance in the customer's own rack, and everything an agent needs is on the appliance: the models, retrieval over the site's documents, Agency Studio, publishing, the stable address, and the run record. A site can run fully air-gapped, or connected only to the systems it already secures. In both cases, what leaves the building is nothing.
No. Agency runs on the Czar appliance in the customer's rack, and nothing about designing, running, reviewing, or auditing an agent requires a connection to the outside. A site can run with no outside path at all, or connected only to systems it already secures. Neither posture sends anything out of the building.
The reason is where the work happens. The agent layer sits on Substrate, the platform on the appliance, and Substrate provides inference, retrieval over the site's documents, memory, adaptation, evaluation, and integrity verification locally. There is no remote service the agent depends on to think.
What runs on the appliance
Everything in a run. The packet arrives from the desk's own application at the stable address. The agent reads what it may read from the corpus the customer placed on the appliance or inside the site. The draft is produced by models on the appliance. The step that waits holds for a reviewer who reaches it over the site's network. The allowed call, if any, goes to a system inside the site. The run record is written to the appliance.
Everything around a run as well. Agency Studio, where operators draw the agent and developers keep it as a file, runs on the appliance. Publishing a version, pointing the stable address, turning it on or off, and changing a role all happen there and are recorded there.
Air-gapped
A fully sovereign site puts the appliance on an isolated segment with no path out. Agents work the same way. The only systems available as tools are the ones inside the segment, which the admin declares. Operators, developers, reviewers, and auditors reach the appliance over the isolated network.
On such a site the boundary is enforced by the absence of a path rather than by a policy. The admin's decisions about tools and the network's isolation agree with each other, which makes the posture simple to reason about.
Connected, but only to what the site secures
Many desks sit on networks that are not isolated and have systems the agent should reach: the ticketing queue, the records system, the ledger. On a connected appliance, the admin makes those systems available as tools and Local Bridge carries declared routes to them over the site's own network.
That is what connected means here. It does not mean the appliance talks to a vendor, fetches models at run time, or reports anywhere. The connections are to the site's own systems, under the site's own controls, and each call an agent makes to them is on the record.
One estate, both postures
A customer with a plant and a finance desk may run the plant air-gapped and the desk connected. Both are Czar, running the same agent layer. A version that names only systems inside a segment publishes on either without change. The posture is decided per appliance, and the agents do not care.
For the platform underneath, see /platform. For how a fully isolated site runs agents end to end, see /resources/agents-on-an-air-gapped-site.
Questions this raises
- Do the models need to call out to work?
- No. The models an agent uses run on the appliance through Substrate. There is no remote inference and no step where a prompt or a document is sent somewhere else to be processed.
- What does connected mean if not the internet?
- It means the appliance has declared routes to systems inside the site, such as the ticketing queue, the records system, or the ledger, that the site already secures. Those routes run over the site's own network and are made available as tools by the admin.
- Can a site change posture later?
- The posture is a property of each appliance and the network the site puts it on. An agent version that names only systems inside a segment runs the same on an air-gapped appliance and a connected one, so moving a desk between postures is a decision about the appliance, not a redesign of the agent.
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