Section 01 — Executive Summary

Sovereign AI Architecture Patterns

Reference architectures for on-premises, private VPC, and air-gapped LLM deployment — hybrid RAG, retrieval guard thresholds, EU AI Act governance APIs, and audit-ready evidence export.

Sovereign AI Hybrid RAG EU AI Act Sovereign by Design

Regulated enterprises are moving from pilot copilots to production sovereign AI stacks. Data residency, retrieval guards, and audit-ready evidence are now board-level requirements — not engineering nice-to-haves.

This whitepaper documents production-proven patterns from WAIG Foundation deployments across government, financial services, and defence — implemented in the Sovereign LLM Workbench platform.

3

Deployment Modes

5

Stack Layers

0

Cloud Egress

Section 02 — Architecture Layers

Five-Layer Sovereign Stack

Experience → Governance → Inference → Knowledge → Infrastructure

Experience Layer

Web workbench, IDE/MCP plugins, admin console, and report builder — productivity without leaving the perimeter.

Governance Layer

EU AI Act API envelope, retrieval guard, consent manager, policy gates, and evidence exporter — every output auditable.

Inference Layer

LM Studio and vLLM adapters, model router, prompt engine — local inference with zero mandatory cloud dependency.

Knowledge Layer

Document parser, embedding service, hybrid vector + sparse index — controlled corpus governance with classification.

Infrastructure Layer

Docker Compose, Kubernetes Helm, GPU node pools, offline update channels — laptop to air-gapped cluster.

Section 03 — Deployment Topologies

Three Sovereign Modes

On-Premises GPU Cluster

Dedicated GPU nodes behind corporate firewall. vLLM or LM Studio for inference. LDAP/AD integration. Best for regulated enterprises with existing data centre capacity.

Typical: 2–8× A100/H100 · 10TB corpus · <200 concurrent users

Private VPC (No Egress)

Isolated cloud tenancy with deny-all egress. Hybrid RAG over internal SharePoint/Confluence. SIEM syslog integration for governance events.

Typical: MeitY-empanelled cloud · private endpoints only · DR within same region

Air-Gapped LabDEFENCE / GOVT

Physically isolated environment. Offline model update channel. HSM-backed key management. Zero external API calls — full sovereignty for classified workloads.

Typical: single-site GPU rack · sneaker-net model updates · classified corpus only

Section 04 — Retrieval Guard

Defensible RAG

Chunk scoring, insufficient-context refusal, and citation enforcement.

Retrieval Guard Pipeline

1Query embedding → hybrid dense + sparse retrieval

2Chunk relevance scoring — threshold gate (default 0.72)

3Insufficient context → explicit refusal (no hallucinated answer)

4Sufficient context → cited generation with source manifest

WITHOUT GUARD

Model fills gaps from parametric knowledge. Auditors cannot verify provenance. Policy Q&A becomes liability.

WITH GUARD

Every claim traceable to corpus chunk. Refusal logged. Citation manifest exported with evidence pack.

Section 05 — Governance & Evidence

EU AI Act & Audit Export

The governance envelope wraps every inference call with policy gates, consent checks, and structured logging — producing regulator-ready evidence without manual spreadsheet assembly.

EU AI ACT API

Risk classification, transparency records, human oversight hooks.

ISO 42001

AI management system controls mapped to platform telemetry.

INDIA DPDP

Consent manager, PII pipeline, data residency enforcement.

EVIDENCE EXPORT

Signed audit packs: query lineage, model version, citations.

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