Where it started
2024
An open experiment
A peer-to-peer network that split a model across whoever was online, so nobody held the whole conversation. Still maintained, still free, and the wrong answer for a hospital.
About
Software for people who cannot send it away
We build infrastructure for running language models on hardware an organisation already controls.
What changed it
Letters
From people with racks
They were not looking for a network of strangers. They had their own machines, their own regulator, and a legal department that had already said no to the obvious option.
What they needed
Proof
Identity and a trail
The same distributed inference, plus an identity system, an audit trail, and somebody to call when it breaks at three in the morning.
Principle
Refuse rather than degrade
A placement that will not fit is refused with the arithmetic and something to do about each term. There is deliberately no flag that overrides a safety check, because a flag like that gets used in exactly the situation it exists to prevent.
Principle
A message is part of the product
An operator meeting a refusal at three in the morning should be told what is wrong, in numbers, and what to do instead. Most of the work in this product is that, and it is not decoration.
Principle
Nothing calls home
No activation, no licence heartbeat, no telemetry, no font from a content delivery network. Not a concession to air-gapped sites: a product that phones a vendor to confirm you may use it is the thing our customers are trying to escape.
Principle
Say what is not mitigated
Our threat model has a section on what we do not claim, and it is the section worth reading. Anybody can list defences.
Where we are
German-speaking Europe first, because that is where the regulatory pressure and the installed hardware coincide: universities with teaching labs, clinics under medical confidentiality, public administrations, and companies whose data cannot go to a third party.
Diffuse Enterprise is commercial software under a proprietary licence. Diffuse Open remains AGPL-3.0 and is not going anywhere.
Trials are thirty days on three machines, running the same software a paying customer runs. If you found a security issue, tell us before you tell anyone else.